


the fountain

by skuls



Series: X Files Rewatch Series [21]
Category: The X-Files
Genre: Case Fic, Episode: s05e04 Detour, Episode: s06e10 Tithonus, Episode: s06e18 Milagro, F/M, Immortal Scully, canon divergence after
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-17
Updated: 2018-02-27
Packaged: 2019-03-20 07:32:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 11
Words: 55,464
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13712922
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skuls/pseuds/skuls
Summary: When Mulder is forced to confront Scully's immortality in the wake of the Padgett case, he can see only one solution: to search for the Fountain of Youth to either look for a way to get rid of it or find a way to keep her from being alone. When Scully is assigned to a serial killer case in the same area as the alleged Fountain, Mulder tags along in an attempt to help her and find the Fountain at the same time.Months later, Mulder has been missing for months and Scully is left only with the leads he was searching for. When a new lead pops up, she departs to search for her partner and to discover what happened before he disappeared six months earlier.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is a long work-in-progress that I have entirely finished, and plan to post daily. It has eleven chapters and should all be up before the next episode of season 11 airs
> 
> This is a casefic that departs from canon after Milagro, and combines Detour and Tithonus. It involves a serial killer plot, so I’m issuing a warning at the beginning for violence. Also a lot of angst and fast-paced/suspenseful plot (I’d definitely call this a thriller, and definitely the darkest thing I’ve written). I’ll try to issue specific warnings in front of each chapter, but just a head’s up at the beginning. 
> 
> The switching perspectives back and forth through different points in time technique is mostly inspired by Dark Places, one of my favorite books by author Gillian Flynn. (Gone Girl uses a similar technique, and everything by GF should absolutely be read.)
> 
> Any inaccuracies in the depiction of a murder investigation/pathology/medical stuff/etc comes from my limited knowledge of this stuff, re: only ever learning about it re: books and TV shows. Any inaccuracies in location comes from me having never spent a lot of time in the area of Florida where the majority of the story takes place. (I researched using Google Maps.) I apologize in advance if I got anything wrong.
> 
> The origin of this story comes from an idea I had during my family’s brief, brief venture to St. Augustine in July, which I posted about here: https://how-i-met-your-mulder.tumblr.com/post/163605975628/my-family-was-passing-through-st-augustine-which. It’s evolved a lot since then, but the same basic premise remains.
> 
> Thanks to @baronessblixen, @frangipanidownunder, @2plumsandagherkin, @scapegrace74-blog, @emilysim, @myownsuperintendent soo incredibly much for proofing a portion of this first chapter in the WIP workshop. I’m so, so grateful for your commentary, it was exceedingly helpful!

_“Gentle reader, the Fountain of Youth is radioactive, and those who imbibe its poisonous heavy waters will suffer the hideous fate of decaying metal. Yet almost without exception, the wretched idiot inhabitants of our benighted planet would gulp down this radioactive excrement if it were offered.”_

_—William S. Burroughs_

 

_“One has to pay dearly for immortality; one has to die several times while one is still alive.”_

_—Friedrich Nietzsche_  
  
  
**chapter one**

**_may, 1999_ **

It always seemed to come down to these life-and-death situations with them.

When he first saw her, sprawled out on the floor with her eyes closed and the blood coating her shirtfront (stiller than he had ever seen her), he thought she was dead. It wasn't an entirely unreasonable assumption. She _looked_ dead, pale and peaceful; he was certain that the amount of blood she’d lost was impossible to survive. His heart stilled when he saw her, door swinging back and hitting the wall hard. He tried to gasp but found he didn’t have enough air, tried to move towards her but could only stumble: his feet wouldn’t move, almost frozen in place. He forced himself to move, walking as if in a daze towards her. _I’ve lost her,_ he thought as he knelt beside her. Nausea welled up inside of him, bile rising in his throat. He couldn’t believe this. _It’s finally happened. I’ve lost her._ The worst thing was this feeling of inevitability, like she was always destined to die like this.

His hands shook as he went to touch her and she jolted away with a yelp. His heart started beating again. He pulled her into his arms and she sobbed violently, digging her fingers into his shoulders. He hadn’t lost her. She was somehow, miraculously, okay. He pressed his cheek into her hair, the space where her shoulder met her neck, and closed his eyes, clutching her tightly.

It wasn’t until later, until after they’d given their statements and she’d showered and gone to sleep in his bed that he started to consider it all. Everything that had happened. It wasn’t until he was lying on his couch, trying to rid his head of these nightmare images, that he asked himself, _How the hell did she survive?_

He lay sprawled on the couch, sleepless, for hours. Scully exited his room sometime past midnight, damp hair tucked behind her ears and one of his shirts hanging to her knees. She jumped a little when she saw him, eyes wide. “I didn’t think you’d be awake,” she mumbled, tugging at the hem of the shirt. “It’s been a long day. It’s late.”

He remembered the awkwardness between them when he’d left her alone in the bedroom earlier—she'd begun to pull away as soon as the police came. He wasn't sure if it had to do with leaving her behind on the way down to the furnace, the things he'd said to her on this case, or just the recent tension in general, but he was sure that if her anger was aimed at him, he deserved it. He'd insisted that she stay at his apartment and recover, that she take the bed, and she'd only nodded. He’d kissed her on the forehead, whispered _I'm so sorry_ as the guilt overtook him, and she'd stiffly replied, _It's okay. Good night, Mulder._ Effectively ending the conversation. He had too much to apologize for and no idea how to do it.

Truthfully, he’d come to terms with the fact that he was in love with her and had confronted it enough over the past few months—been forced to, between her shooting and the skirmish at the bank robbery and this, _this_ —but he’d rarely allowed himself to consider that she might feel the same way. With all the tension between them that had building for months, the iciness since the ordeal at El Rico Air Force Base and the things he'd said to her before then, he'd had doubts in the strength of their relationship, the possibility that she might be done with him. Until Padgett claimed that Scully was already in love.

“Sorry,” he said sheepishly to her as she stood awkwardly in the midst of the living room. “I can't sleep.” Images of Scully soaked in blood on his floor danced in his head.

She nodded, looking down at her bare feet. He’d seen Scully casual like this before, but it felt strangely intimate in that moment, after the months of chasteness. This, somehow, was different than seeing her wrapped up in a robe and a green face mask in Arcadia Falls; she was swimming in his Quantico t-shirt, small and vulnerable. “Do you have coffee?” she asked the floor.

“In the kitchen.” Mulder climbed to his feet, shoving the blankets aside. “I’ll make it.”

She didn't thank him, just wordlessly sat down at the table. He filled the coffeemaker and leaned against the counter while it whirred, its bitter smell filling the room. She didn’t say anything. He poured her a cup, fixed it the way she liked it and carried it over to the table. She was resting her chin on her forearms like a tired first grader, didn’t make a move towards the drink when he set it down in front of her. By the time he'd fixed himself a cup, she was still in the same position. “Scully,” he said softly as he sunk down in the chair across from her, running a hand over her shoulder. She jerked, clearly startled. “Coffee’s ready.”

“Sorry,” she mumbled, scooping up the mug. She took a long sip, eyes slipping closed.

Mulder watched her quietly, unable to quench his worry. “How you feeling?” he finally asked.

She winced, setting the mug down on the table with a clink. “He pulled out my _heart_ , Mulder.”

Panic shot through him like a drug, astonishment clogging his throat. There were flashes of crime scene photos, blood, still-beating hearts. “Scully…” he tried, nervous.

“I saw it. I _felt_ it. I saw his hand go into my chest, and I saw him holding up my heart.” Her eyes were closed, hand pressing into the table hard. The edge bit into the white skin of her arm. “I remember it… it was still _beating_ in his hand. My blood was all over his arm. And then it just all went black. The next thing I remember is waking up with you leaning over me,” she whispered. “I don’t know how I survived.”

Terrified, Mulder stood and shuffled around the table to kneel in front of her. He pressed a palm to the pulse point in her neck and was relieved to feel it fluttering under his hand. “You still have your heart, Scully,” he said. “I can feel it.”

She shuddered, reached up to cover his hand with her own. “I’ve been thinking a lot about… the Fellig case,” she said softly. “The after-effects of it.”

He thought of the old man dead and bleeding through his camera, Scully frail in a hospital bed, her thumb nudging his. He’d said, _I think Death only looks for you once you seek its opposite,_ and she’d looked so tired, incredibly defeated. Like she knew. “Scully…” he started again, uncertain.

“You remember Bruckman? Clyde Bruckman? He knew how people would die?” Her pulse fluttered and fluttered under his fingers. “He said I wouldn’t. I asked him how I died, and he said I won’t. ‘You don’t’, those were his exact words.”

She was shaking under his hands, clearly terrified. He remembered her face in the hospital, after he’d said that he thought Fellig would’ve lived forever, the stubborn way she refused to discuss the case afterwards. She didn’t believe before, but maybe she did in that moment. If her attacker really pulled out her heart…

Mulder shuddered. He wanted to hold her. “Scully…” he tried again.

She pulled away abruptly. “I need to get some sleep,” she said, standing. Her chair smacked against the table as she stood. He had to scramble a little to get out of her way. “Thanks for the coffee, Mulder,” she added. Her feet padded over the hardwood floors, the door snicking shut behind her.

\---

He'd never entirely considered the idea of Scully's immortality. To be truthful, he never entirely believed it. Something about the sight of her half-dead in a hospital bed had made her mortality seem all the more obvious. It seemed impossible, all the times he'd almost lost her. But now, now… now, after the encounter with Padgett, it almost felt probable. All these times she'd almost died, missing things by a hair. Maybe she was immortal. Maybe the only reason he hadn't lost her was because she'd reached a level of permanence that nobody else could achieve. He always knew he wasn't worthy.

He found himself watching her out of the corner of his eye when she returned to the office. Her heart was still beating. She was alive, whether from dumb luck or divine intervention or an apparent inability to die. He loved her more than he could put into words. She came into the office on a Saturday and he took her to play baseball.

He'd never really thought she was immortal, even after her shooting, just dumbly lucky in a life that seemed to love to try and take her down. But if that was the bargain, he'd take it. As long as she was okay.

But her words rattled around in his head for days, weeks after the ordeal. Her claims that her heart had been pulled out. Her allusions to immortality. He couldn't shake it. He'd read legends of immortality before—in mythology, in vampirism and magic, and it was always portrayed one of two ways: either as a coveted treasure or a horrible curse. Fellig had hated it, Scully told him one night while she was half-high on painkillers, hair spilling over her pillowcase like blood as she nudged her thumb against his. Fellig had wanted to die.

Mulder had always found it fascinating himself. Never coveted it, certainly, but with the exclusion of losing everyone you loved, he could see the benefits of standing still as the world turned around you. He wondered, not for the first time, what Scully thought.

Sunday, he went into work again. This time, he pulled a file from the silver cabinet. The one on Alfred Fellig.

\---

“Sorry I'm late,” Scully told him mid-Monday morning, walking in over an hour late with her briefcase bouncing off of her leg. “I had a meeting with Skinner.”

She looked far from death, hair tucked behind her ears and face set seriously. She set down her briefcase and sat down across from him. “A meeting about what?” Mulder asked, leaning back in his chair.

“That serial killer case that the Violent Crime Section has been working on for a few months now,” she told him.

“The stabbing one?” He put his feet up on the desk. She shot him a look of playful annoyance and rapped his feet with a pen. He lowered them to the floor. “The one in Tallahassee?”

“That's the one,” she said, crossing her arms. “Apparently they're in need of a pathologist, and Skinner recommended me. He mentioned being impressed by my recent work.”

“Why not both of us?” he said, crossing his arms. “I would think that with my profiling experience…”

“You would think,” Scully repeated, with some unreadable negative emotion in her voice. In a way that left Mulder unable to tell who it was she was angry at. “Actually, there's a few reasons it's just me. For one, Kersh is heading the investigation. And while he seems to want to give me another chance after what happened in New York, I don't think I need to explain why he opted not to request your assistance.” Mulder grimaced at this, and it wasn't because of the implications of Kersh not liking him; he knew he was under Kersh's scrutiny. It was because of New York, and the file sitting in his briefcase.

Scully was still talking. “And for another,” she said, “they're still not very happy with the results of the Padgett case, Mulder.” Her jaw was set, but he could tell she didn't want to particularly talk about this. “The way it ended…”

“Right,” he said bluntly. Thinking of Padgett still filled him with fury, even after finding him dead beside the incinerator, heart outside of his body. That fucker, what he'd done to Scully… “So, what am I supposed to do in the meantime? Are you headed off to Florida for an indeterminate amount of time?”

“Skinner said it was still up in the air,” said Scully, tucking hair behind her ear. “They haven't had any new victims in a few weeks, and there's no pattern to predict, no way to set a trap. He recommended me, but they haven't asked for me officially yet. It's just a waiting game, I suppose.”

The Tallahassee Stabbings, as the murders were known in the break room, had been stumping the FBI for months. It was a serial killer case thus far with just the barest connection between the individual murders: they were all stabbings with the same or a similar blade, and all of the bodies were dumped in a park in Tallahassee. But the victims varied in gender, in age, in place of origin. They'd all been abducted from various places in America and reappeared days later in Tallahassee. Although the case was mainly under the jurisdiction of the Tallahassee Bureau, Kersh had taken a small task force to Florida to assist, and they had very little overall to work with. It was the kind of case that would've driven Mulder crazy, back in the day. The kind of case he was more than happy to leave behind.

“Have they really been unable to find any connection between the victims?” Mulder asked. “No similarities whatsoever?”

Scully shrugged. “None so far, as far as I know. I'm not officially on the case yet, anyways.”

“Well,” he said, thinking of Scully limp on the floor covered in her own blood. “I hope they don't need you. It's too soon after… after everything.”

Her jaw worked back and forth, clearly annoyed. “I'm fine, Mulder,” she said shortly. “I am perfectly capable of doing my job. And besides that, I don't think this consists of field work. It'd be mostly autopsies.”

“Right, I just…” He stopped, unsure of what to say next that wouldn't make her angry. The Padgett case had been just a serial killer case at first, too. He let his mouth shut, opened it again. “Just don't want you to get hurt again,” he finished lamely. The file he'd lifted loomed large in his mind, a morbid certainty; he thought that maybe Scully wouldn't die, no matter what happened to her or how old she got, but he still never wanted her hurt. Never wanted to risk it, risk her. If he was wrong…

“Mulder,” Scully was saying sternly. She stared him in the eye, annoyed and self-assured. “Nothing bad is going to happen to me. You can't be this protective of me. We work in law enforcement, which means there's always a risk of some kind or another, but I am not going to be at risk in every case. Just because I was shot a few months ago…”

“I know,” he said quickly. “I know.” And he did. Scully was perfectly capable of handling herself, and there was no reason to think that she'd be in danger in.this case. Absolutely no reason at all.

Scully irritably fiddled with the pen in her hand. “We've been through a lot,” she said bitingly. “These past few months. I think we both know that.”

Oh, he knew. He chewed at his lower lip quietly. He thought again of the file in his briefcase. If what Scully had said after Padgett was true, than he'd never have to fear for her life again.

“But we need to move on.” Scully twisted the pen in her hand like a baton before setting it back on the top of the desk. “Both of us.”

“I know,” he said again. He reached out and touched the back of her hand—briefly, a brushing of fingers. “I do, Scully. I just worry.”

Her face softened a little. Just a little. “I know you do,” she said. “But nothing is going to happen, Mulder. This is a perfectly normal case that I will be working with a dozen other officers. There's no reason to assume that I'll get hurt on this case.”

He nodded to show he understood. His hand was hovering below the desk, inches away from his briefcase; he brushed his thumb over the edge of the folder. _God,_ he thought, thinking of her without her heart, blood seeping from her bullet wound in her stomach, his nightmares of her hurt, dying, _I hope so._

\---

**_october, 1999_ **

She found herself thinking of immortality at times. And never in a particularly gracious way. She'd read countless books on the subject in the months since it happened, and found absolutely no answers. Sometimes, she reread the Fellig file, flipping through Mulder's report and pretending she could hear his voice. Sometimes she tried to remember the conversation she'd had with Fellig, what he said right before the bullet carved a hole through her middle. How the pain was only there at the beginning, fiery-hot, and then it left. It went away so quickly that after a few days, she wouldn't have believed them if they'd told her why she was in the hospital.

When she slept, she didn't dream about being shot. But sometimes she'd dream about that night in the Florida woods. Humidity thick in the air, tape slick and sticky around her wrists, the taste of copper, and the blade flashing before her, blood dripping down Mulder's neck and the front of his shirt…

Scully woke up as the lights come up, the plane descending through the clouds. She always slept on planes. She hated the habit now; she didn’t sleep peacefully anymore. She slept restlessly, tossing and turning through nightmares, and had embarrassed herself more than once by waking up screaming. She missed the days when she could sleep easily on planes, wake up with her head on Mulder's shoulder and his voice nudging her gently out of sleep. She sat up further, pushing her hair out of her eyes, and flipped open the top of the file. Not the case she was coming back from—she hadn't solved that one. The X-Files were labeled as unsolved for a reason, and she wasn't as good at them without Mulder. (Skinner kept threatening to give her a new partner, and she kept pointing out that Mulder had run the X-Files for nearly two years alone. But if her solve rate kept being shitty, she suspected he would, and she suspected it would be Diana Fowley. And that was the last damn thing she needed right now.) She was done with the case in question. No, the file she kept on the airplane tray in front of her was Mulder's file, the one she kept adding to, reading over and over. The one she refused to let go.

Scully bypassed the crime scene photos—nothing there but blood dried on leaves and frayed duct tape, and she knew it inside and out. She shoved her statement aside and flipped to the statement of the police who had searched the woods. Michele Fazekas had been among them; she'd shared several cups of coffee with her as they'd gone over and over it all. One of the things that Scully feared was that even if Mulder had escaped that night, somehow, he'd simply been taken directly after by the mothman-creatures from two years ago. That she wouldn't find him no matter what.

(She wouldn't let herself consider her worst fear: that she was right about what she'd seen that night, and Mulder really was dead out there somewhere. On the record, she was pursuing her abductor and Mulder's killer, but off the record, she was looking for him. She wouldn't stop looking for him.)

The plane took a sharp dip, and the crime scene photos shifted, sliding out from under her statement and across the tray. The red-brown splotches of her and Mulder's blood flashed before her eyes. Scully's stomach lurched. She pretended it was the plane.

\---

She drove home from the airport, watching the road with a bored, glazed look. She drove in silence, which was the norm now. So much space to talk, but she had nothing to say and no one to talk to. She drove home alone, like so many times before, but she was coming from somewhere utterly unremarkable. She didn't know what to do. She didn't want to go home alone again.

She could've gone to the Gunmen's; she'd fallen asleep countless times on their musty old couch after a night of poring over Mulder's case. They were helping her look for Mulder or Mulder's killer, whichever was out there to find. Their apartment was the closest she'd been to truly happy since the accident; her visits with her mother had been awkward, all concern on both ends since her mother's car accident and her own injuries. And work didn't hold the same allure it once did; working was good, kept her mind occupied, but it wasn't pleasurable. And the X-Files just made her anxious. Made her wish she had leads on Mulder's case. She could hole up on the Gunmen's couch and pretend that they didn't all have the same hole in their chest. That they didn't all miss the same person.

They wouldn't give up on him any more than she would. Skinner had indicated that he was likely dead, based on the circumstances in which Scully had been found, but the Gunmen continued to believe he was alive. There hadn't been a funeral. She'd gone to bat with Mulder's mother many, many times over it, but she wouldn't let them bury him. Not yet. He hadn't given up on her when her mother had tried to declare her dead in 1994. She would give him the same courtesy. Especially if she couldn't trust her own eyes.

The Gunmen trusted her when she said that Mulder was alive, that he had to be alive, and that was probably because she hadn't told them what she'd seen. That she'd lied about Mulder being fine when she passed out. The car rolled to a stop at a stoplight, her eyes slipping closed briefly. She wouldn't go to the Gunmen's tonight. She drove home with both hands clutching the wheel firmly.

The key clanked loudly in the lock as she twisted it open, entering her apartment wearily. There was a stack of papers on her kitchen table, a mug stained brown on her counter that she must've forgotten to wash before leaving for the latest case. The fish tank gave off muted blue light from its spot on the counter. She leaned over and shook some food in it.

She'd kept the fish after the accident. She hadn't known what Mulder called them, or if they even had names, so she'd given them names. The corny part was that she'd named them all after variations of Bigfoot, since that was the only monster she could think of that hadn't tried to kill them yet. The mollies were Bigfoot and Sasquatch, and they looked so similar that she had no idea which was which. The goldfish was Yeti, the blue one was Abominable Snowman, and the red one was Nonexistent Humanoid Ape-Man (her personal favorite). She rarely referred to them by their names because every time she did, she could just hear Mulder laughing at her, teasing her, and she had to close her eyes for a little bit. The fish swam happily around in the tank, their mouths gaping to catch the pellets. Scully tapped the glass affectionately next to Nonexistent Humanoid Ape-Man, and set her bag down, going into the living room. It was nights like this she really missed her dog.

She collapsed on the couch, pulling her knees up to her stomach and pulling the blanket over her. The Navajo blanket from Mulder's couch. There was a few messages on her machine. She ignored them. She flipped on the TV and curled into a tight ball.

She tried to sleep, to focus on what was playing on the TV, tried not to think, but it didn't work. It just rattled over and over again, the details she could count on from that night. She'd passed out at some point during it all, just after they started to hurt Mulder, and woke up minutes or hours later, alone in the forest. With wounds that likely should have killed her in her side, blood caked up and down her hip in excessive amounts, and her hands taped behind her back. She'd tried calling for help, but the tape over her mouth muffled her calls. And there was no one to hear her, anyway. She lay sprawled on the ground for who knows how long, pain rolling through her in white-hot waves every time she tried to move, tears trickling down her face and plastering her hair to her cheeks. She'd called out for Mulder, but she knew he wasn't coming.

At some point in the night, the pain had stopped. The same way it did with Fellig. She managed to stumble to her feet, even with her hands behind her, and started walking, a slow stumble where too much jostling send nausea coursing through her. That was where her memory went fuzzy again. She remembered reaching a road at mid-day, remembered the driver of a little blue car stopping to help her. He'd pulled the tape off of her bruised lips, his eyes wide with horror and concern, asked if she was okay, and she'd rasped, “Mulder needs help,” at him just before passing out.

The doctors said it was a miracle she lived, with the wounds she had. The doctors said she was in a coma for two days. The doctors said the first thing she said when waking up was, “Where's Mulder?” in a high, panicked, demanding voice. She didn't remember any of that. She just remembered how it felt when she found out they'd never found him. When she realized he wasn't coming back.

Her face was wet now, and she reached up to wipe her cheeks with her fingertips. It had been months since all of this had happened, but it lingered with her. She couldn't shake it, the way she couldn't shake Barry or Pfaster or Modell for months after. It was all her nightmares of Mulder being hurt or killed, that terrifying stretch of days where she thought he was dead in 1996, but worse because the images were real. These things that haunted her were real. She saw the way he gasped helplessly for breath whenever she closed her eyes. Her never-ending nightmare. She sniffled a little, wiping her eyes, and leaned her forehead on her knees. She missed him more than she ever would've expected in those tension-filled months after the latest incident with Cassandra Spender. More than she could put into words.

The phone ringing shocked her out of her stupor. Uncurling from herself like a lazy cat, Scully reached for her cell phone where she'd left it on the coffee table. In the early months since Mulder's disappearance, she'd gotten jittery with every phone call, either with hope that it'd be good news—Mulder was alive, he'd been found—or bad news—they'd found Mulder's body but not his killer. Or it was her mother, she was in the hospital again, the last important person in her life gone. Lately, Scully had just been hoping for a lead. Anything, anything. _Good news,_ she thought now as she pulled the phone to her. She clicked the answer button, sighed, “Scully,” into the speaker.

“Agent Scully.” Not Mulder. Skinner. “How was the case in Milwaukee?”

She glared up at the ceiling. Skinner never called for pleasantries like this; he waited for her report. He had to have information for her, to be calling out of nowhere like this. “It was fine,” she said in a rushed voice. “Couldn't find the monster. Sir, did you need something? It's late.” _Get to the fucking point._

Skinner sighed heavily. The indication of something he didn't want to tell her, but that he knew he had to. “There's been a development,” he said. “In Tallahassee.”

Scully sat straight up, her fingers cold around the phone. For a split second, she couldn't breathe. “Mulder?” she blurted.

“No,” said Skinner quickly. “Not… not exactly.”

 _They've found them,_ Scully thought. The men who had abducted the two of them and tried to kill them in the forest. Maybe they'd even confessed to killing Mulder. “What is it then, sir?” she asked tightly.

“It's… it's Peyton Ritter.”

Her eyebrows raised. She hadn't heard anything about the man who'd shot her since his dismissal from the FBI, his profuse apologies for shooting her. “What does Ritter have to do with this?” she demanded.

Skinner paused for a moment before explaining. “Scully, he's popped up in Tallahassee. Stab wounds similar to the victims in the Tallahassee case. To put it bluntly, similar to the wounds you suffered this summer. He's alive, but barely. And every indication is that he is also a victim of these men who took you and Mulder.”

It wasn't what she'd hoped for, but it was something. Something, anything that could lead her to Mulder. Scully stumbled to her feet, searching blindly in the dark living room for her shoes. “I'm on my way,” she said.


	2. Chapter 2

** chapter two **

**_may, 1999_ **

It was a normal day at the office when Scully got the call. A normal day, just waiting for Scully to be summoned to go catch a serial killer. When the phone rang, Mulder thought it was that.

He knew it wasn't as soon as her face went sheet-white, as soon as she jolted to her feet like she was on fire. She looked like she was about to throw up. Panic shot through him; he wondered, for a moment, if her cancer was back. If she'd been tested by the doctor and hadn't told him, and the doctor was calling with the news. If she was dying and he hadn't known. But then she spoke in a frantic way, saying, “I'm on my way,” before slamming the phone down, and he realized it couldn't possibly be that.

“Scully?” he asked. She was rushing around, scrambling for her briefcase and her coat, half in a daze. “What happened? Is everything okay?”

She stopped briefly, hair falling over her face. “Um,” she said, her voice teetering on the edge of tears. “My mom's been in a car accident.”

He blinked in surprise, worry; Scully's mother was a sweet woman, nicer to him than he deserved, and he knew how much Scully leaned on her. She couldn't be… “Is she…” he got out uneasily. “Is she going to be…”

“I don't know.” Scully squared her shoulders, blinking rapidly as if to ward off tears. “They said… they said she'd lost a lot of blood. I don't know. I need to…”

“I'll drive you,” he said immediately.

Scully shook her head. “No, Mulder, I can…”

“No, I'll drive you.” He reached out and touched her shoulder. She sniffled a little, wiping her eyes. “I don't want you to have to go alone,” he said quietly. “It's fine, Scully, really. I can drive you. Let me drive you.”

She wiped her eyes again, nodded. Mulder squeezed her shoulder before letting go, helped her with her coat at the door. It was loose, flapping around her slim shoulders; she looked so small. She walked ahead of them out to the carport, dialing her brother's number. She talked to Bill as Mulder started the car, spoke in a fixed tone as she stared out the window. Her voice broke when she said she didn't know what her mother's condition was. “I'll call you as soon as I know,” she said thickly. Mulder stared out the window of the car, jaw clenched so as not to reveal his fear for Scully's sake. “Okay. I'll see you soon. I love you, Bill.” The phone beeped as she hung up.

Mulder waited a beat, two before speaking. “Are you going to call your other brother?”

Scully laughed bitterly and humorlessly. “Charlie? I have no reason to. We haven't heard from him in years. He doesn't care about Mom, or what happens to her.”

Mulder was stunned into silence. He'd heard a story or two about Charlie, but never anything about this, about an estrangement from the family. He couldn't believe he didn't know that. “I thought you… babysat his son a few years ago.”

“Yep.” Scully wrapped an arm around her ribcage. “Last time I saw him. It went terribly. Watching _Babe_ fifteen times a day was the highlight of that visit. By then, he hadn't talked to Mom since Melissa’s funeral.” She sniffled a little, wiping her nose.

Mulder winced, eyes on the road. Scully had already lost so much. He didn't know if she could bear losing anyone else. He wanted to tell her that her mom would be okay, but he knew how hard it was to hear shit like that, especially if it ended up not being true. He remembered the relatives who told him that his sister would come back someday, again and again, but she never did. He'd told her he was sorry about her father, about her sister, about Emily, but he wouldn't tell her he was sorry about her mother, not now. Not when there was a good chance her mother might live.

He did reach down and put his hand on the center console. A few minutes later, he felt Scully take it. Her palm was wet, the remnants of tears, but if she was still crying, she did it silently. He squeezed her fingers. She sniffled a little. They drove in silence the rest of the way to the hospital.

\---

Maggie Scully was going to be okay. She had a broken arm and a few broken ribs and some head trauma, and head wounds bleed a lot, of course, but she would be fine. She was conscious, even, and able to talk to Scully. Scully almost cried with relief when the nurse told her, both hands over her mouth. Mulder's chest swelled with relief as soon as he heard.

Scully sent him home soon after she got the news. “There's no need for you to stay here,” she said, casting a somewhat impatient look towards the hallway towards her mother's room. “I'll be okay waiting.”

“I can stay,” he offered gently. “I don't want to leave you alone in a hospital.”

“I'm fine, Mulder. Really.” She gripped her elbows in both hands, eyes shifting around the room nervously. “Thank you for driving me.”

Mulder didn't want to leave her alone there, but he didn't argue any more. He didn't want to upset her worse, give her something else to worry about. He did lean down and kiss her temple, the spot where her hairline melded with her forehead. She shivered a little against him, but she didn't say anything. “Call me if you need me,” he said, brushing her hip with his hand. “Okay?”

She nodded mutely. She didn't smile, but her eyes shone with gratefulness as he turned to leave.

Mulder drove straight back to his apartment, stopping briefly at a drug store to buy a get well card for Maggie. (After everything, he felt like he owed her that, at least.) He collapsed on the couch at home, flipping on the TV before reaching for the files he'd left on the coffee table. It was the Tallahassee Stabbings files; he'd been looking through them out of boredom. Trying to come up with some insight to offer Scully if she was called to Florida.

There were five victims thus far: Virginia Barclay, a woman local to Tallahassee estimated to be in her twenties and the only body to have been stolen from the morgue; Janet Rice, a single woman in her forties abducted from Columbus, Ohio; Stan Jameson, a twenty-four year old from a small town in Arizona; Oliver Alexander, a man in his eighties from Connecticut; and Kenneth Rigby, a man in his sixties from Vermont. They had all been found at or around a park in Tallahassee, with knife wounds from a similar weapon (which had not been found at the crime scene). But there was no pattern in the placement of the knife wounds. No pattern between the victims, either, but that was what he was hoping to find.

He found the edge of the Barclay file and brought it to the top of the stack, flipping it open. He had the most interest in that one, as it was the most unusual of the murders: both the origin of Tallahassee and the disappearance of the body, an M.O. that had not been repeated with any of the other victims. If he'd had to guess, he'd say that the killer was building up to victims further away by starting in Tallahassee, except for the fact that Florida to Ohio was a big leap. And besides, if the killer was trying to start small and slowly get bigger, there'd likely be more local victims. (He made a note to tell Scully to look for similar murders in Tallahassee from a few years ago.) But what he didn't get was why only one body had been stolen. Had there been something special about that particular victim? Had he gone back to steal the second, the third, the fourth victims and chickened out? Found more security? Had he almost gotten caught the first time and not felt it worth it to go back? Had there been something special about Virginia Barclay, something different? Mulder didn't know. He scribbled another note to Scully, sticking it on the file.

Hours after he left the hospital, after he had blearily given up on reading through files and was just watching TV, there was a knock at the door. He was tempted to tell whoever it was just to go away, but when the knock came again, more insistent, he considered the idea that it might be Scully. He blinked the sleepiness out of his eyes, scrubbing his hands through his hair, stood sleepily and went to the door.

Scully was, in fact, on the other side. Her trench coat hung loosely on her and her eyes were red around the edges. She balled her fists in her pocket and muttered, “Hi.”

“Hey, Scully… here, come in.” He motioned her in and she came. He brushed a hand over her shoulder as she passed. “How's your…”

“She's fine,” said Scully, rubbing at her eyes. She was looking at the floor, over her shoulder, at the wall, anywhere but his eyes. She looked absolutely exhausted. “Bill got here. He's sitting with her. He sent me home.”

“That's good… uh, it's really late, Scully,” he said awkwardly. Not that he wasn’t happy to see her, but he was worried about her. She looked like she could fall over on the spot. “You should get some sleep.”

She shook her head firmly, rubbing her eyes again before lifting her chin to look at him. “I don't need sleep, Mulder. I need to not think.”

For a childish second, he thought she had come to lose herself in him. A quick fuck they'd never talk about again. He'd considered it before, back when it really might not have meant something, but the days since that had been true seemed far and few between. He couldn't ever do things casually because he wouldn't be able to walk away. “Scully,” he started again, uncertain.

“Do you have anything to drink?” She stalked past him towards the living room.

Well, he could do that, at least. He went into the kitchen and poured her a glass of vodka, another for himself. They sat beside each other on the couch, their knees brushing. Mulder flipped the file closed quickly when he realized in a failed attempt to keep her from seeing it. She didn't seem to care, just turned her gaze to the TV and watched in silence. She poured her second and third and fourth glasses herself.

After her fifth glass, she sagged tiredly back against the couch. Mulder, who had stopped at two for the simple reason of making sure neither of them did anything stupid, pretended he was watching the TV instead of her. And then she spoke for the first time in long minutes.

“I don't know if I can do this,” she said, words soft and slow as if they'd been sanded off at the edges, but voice dead serious.

Startled, he looked straight at her. Her head was bowed, as if praying, her hair hiding her face, her hands knotted in her lap. “Scully?” he asked cautiously, leaning closer. Not sure if _this_ was watching loved ones get hurt, or doing anything at all.

“I can't.” Scully motioned wildly, almost hitting him in the face. She didn't seem to notice that she'd done it, lost in the weight of her words and the drinks, but Mulder leaned back just the same, still watching her carefully. “Watch everyone I love die and go on forever knowing I'll never see them again," she continued bitterly, shoving hair out of her face.

He was startled once again, but for completely different reasons. He remembered sitting mere feet away from here, listening to her talk about the possibility that she wouldn't die. She never used the word immortal, but she said that Bruckman said she wouldn't die. He remembered her raw terror that night. And he'd stolen the Fellig file to find out if that were true, but she hadn't mentioned it since. “Scully…” he said again, uncertain of what he could say. He reached out and touched the side of her face.

“I don't want to die, Mulder,” Scully said thickly. “But I don't want to live forever. I don't want to be alone.”

He tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, unable to help himself. “You're not alone,” he said quietly. “Your mom is going to be fine, Scully.”

“But she might not have been,” she replied stubbornly, teetering on the edge of tears. “And someday she won't be. If Fellig and Bruckman were right, someday I'll be alone and there won't be anything I can do to change that.”

Overwhelmed with the emotion in her words, he leaned forward and kissed her forehead. She didn't shrink away, just reached up and wiped her cheeks. “Maybe they're wrong,” he said quietly, nose brushing her forehead. He didn’t pull away, not yet; he wanted to wrap his arms around her and never let go. “Maybe you're not…”

Scully laughed bitingly, thumping her hands on his chest. “Maybe not,” she slurred. “But of all people, I thought _you_ would believe in this. You believe in everything.”

“I don't know what to believe,” he whispered. And he didn't. He didn't know what he _wanted_ to believe. He'd wondered what Scully had thought, and now he knew. And he didn't want this for her. He didn't want to lose her, but he didn't want to leave her.

Scully leaned forward, wrapping her arms around his ribs, and he hugged her back tightly, pressed his nose to the soft spot underneath her ear. She was trembling in his arms, just a little, but the sniffles had slowed. A tear hit his shoulder. He rubbed circles on her back in an attempt to soothe her. “I don't want to be alone,” she muttered, and she was drunk, half asleep, but he understood every emotion she was expressing. He feared loneliness, too, knew it all too well. Scully was the first person in his life that had never once caused him loneliness, had never once left him on purpose; even when she came close, even when he didn’t deserve it, she always came back. “Promise you won't leave me alone, Mulder,” she said. “I don't wanna… not you or Mom or Bill… just stay. Please. Promise.”

Scully had never left him, and he never, ever wanted to leave her. She’d saved him. She was the constant in his life. And he had no idea if she felt about him the way he felt about her, but he knew that he couldn’t leave her alone.

He knew she didn't know what she was saying, probably wouldn't even remember it in the morning, but he still whispered, “I promise.” And somewhere between letting go of her, between easing her down on the couch and covering her with a blanket, between lying alone in his bed, he'd decided that, somehow, he wouldn't break that promise.

\---

**_october, 1999_ **

She'd been on the phone with him when it happened.

Scully had thought a lot about that conversation in the months since it happened. The last conversation between them, maybe the last they'd ever have. The last things he'd ever hear her say. Of course, whenever she thought that, she'd usually push those thoughts aside and remind herself that he could still be alive. All logic aside, she was hanging on to the possibility that he could still be alive. But remembering that phone conversation seemed to strengthen any part of her that believed Mulder was really dead.

She'd called him from her motel room while he was on some venture to find the Fountain of Youth (at the time, she'd mostly dismissed the whole thing as ridiculous and a fucking waste of time, but now she'd never forget what it was he was looking for). She'd been exhausted after a day of going over and over the case with the rest of the task force, irritated at Mulder, and she'd called him to apologize for everything that had happened earlier and also ask where the hell he was (she was worried he'd go into the forest where they'd almost died alone and get himself killed). He'd told her that he'd found it, this thing of immortality, and she'd snapped. She'd just snapped. Every fight they’d had in the past few months, every time he’d ditched her or dismissed her or ignored her culminating in that moment. She'd demanded to know why he'd ditched her this time. She'd accused him of being selfish, of caring about an X-File more than this case where people were dying. She'd asked him what the hell was so important about tracking down something that had supposedly been around for thousands of years, _if_ it even existed. And Mulder, who'd been quiet for most of the conversation, had said softly, “It's because of you. I'm doing this for you. So you won't have to be alone.”

Stunned, she'd remembered a conversation they'd had in the wake of her mother's accident. She'd been drunk on his couch, and it had just slipped. She'd said that if she was immortal, she didn't know if she could bear watching everyone she loved die. If she could bear being alone. She'd said that, and wanted to forget it in the morning, and Mulder… Mulder had looked for a way to make sure she'd never have to be alone. Stunned, she'd blinked hard in the wake of Mulder's words, a lump forming in her throat. “Oh,” she'd murmured, genuinely touched, even if annoyance lay just below the surface. “Oh, Mulder.”

And then the pain had come. Sudden and sharp at the back of her head as something heavy made contact. Her vision went red as she fell face first into the carpet of the motel room. The phone clattered from her hand. “Scully?” Mulder called, nervous. “Scully, are you there? What happened?” She blinked hard, scrabbling across the carpet, her vision blurry. She had to get away; she had to ask for his help. She had no idea what was happening. “Scully!” Mulder shouted, desperate, his voice ringing in her ears.

She groped for the phone, fingers stiff. “Mulder,” she croaked. And then she was hit again. Her chin hit the ground hard. Everything went black.

She'd woken up in hell, her mouth taped shut. She wouldn't be able to apologize before it was all over.

These were the things Scully thought about in the quiet moments, with nothing but her thoughts rattling around in her head. She missed the way Mulder's voice would fill these moments, rambling on about something she would've found ridiculous at the time. She missed it now, every single one of his insane ideas, his theories that brought on eye-rolls. It was almost surprising how much she missed it, when she was sitting alone on a flight to Tallahassee, flying off to find her partner. Her second flight of the evening. Well, she'd flown more in one day. (The Pincus case in Chicago had her flying three times in one day by the end of it, and all for Mulder. For Mulder, for his safety, it was worth it.)

Skinner hadn't wanted her to come. She'd been off the case since her accident; recuperation first, and by the time she was cleared for field work, the case had gone dry. No new leads for months, not since Mulder's disappearance. Until now. Skinner had said something about it being too soon, not wanting her to risk herself. “You were a victim of this killer, Agent Scully,” he'd said. “There's no need to put yourself at further risk.”

“I'm coming,” Scully had snapped, throwing some clothes in a suitcase without bothering to fold them. “This is a lead. We've been waiting for something like this.”

“You know I'll look for him,” said Skinner quietly. “If I found him, you'd be the first call I made.”

Scully swallowed, eyes on her shoes. “I'm coming,” she said. “I need to find him. I'll investigate against orders if I need to. Sir.”

Skinner had sighed, conceded. He knew how insistent she was on this. He knew how furious her reaction would be if he said no.

So there she was, on a plane to Florida. Tense and nervous as hell. And nothing in her mind but the last time she'd been. The plane ride from Tallahassee back to DC, her brother at her side, her mother meeting them at the airport. She swallowed and looked out the window, the tiny houses and trees below. It looked like the playset Charlie had as a child. She tried not to picture Mulder down there somewhere, hurt and scared. Or dead. She thought of the plastic grass, and the trees that Charlie would line up along the stairs, away from the square of fake nature they'd came with. Playing God in a sense. She thought of the first time she flew.

In Tallahassee, she exited the airport and took a cab straight to the hospital that Skinner had told her Ritter was at. He met her in the lobby, pacing through with his tie loose around his neck. “Agent Scully,” he greeted her grimly, nervously pulling at the tie.

“How is he?” asked Scully, hands fisted in the pockets of her suit jacket. The truth was that she hadn't thought of Peyton Ritter in months, hadn't liked him very much _before_ he shot her, but she couldn't help but care, at least a little. And—she knew how horrible it was to think things like this, but she couldn't help it—if he was going to live through this, he might remember something about his attacker. A lead. Something that could help her find Mulder.

“He's stable, but he's in a coma. He lost a lot of blood,” said Skinner. He stepped closer, reaching out to touch her shoulder in concern. (He'd been doing the fatherly worry thing a lot since Mulder's disappearance, and Scully didn't know why it pissed her off so much, but it did.) “How are you, agent? You just got back from Milwaukee last night; have you slept?” he asked her in a tone that straddled the line between stern and concerned.

“I slept on the plane,” she said impatiently, stepping back and squaring her shoulders. “Will they let me see him? Examine him?”

“I can put in a good word,” Skinner replied. “But I'm not sure that's a good idea, considering your history with Ritter…”

Scully's jaw worked back and forth. The truth was, she was exhausted. She needed to see Ritter, right now. After that, she needed to go to a motel and get some rest, but she wanted to gauge Ritter's condition before doing anything else. She wanted to have an idea of what was in store for the impending investigation. She'd been waiting too long for a lead. Now that one had appeared, she wasn't very well going to ignore it. “Sir,” she started tightly. “I hardly see how Ritter having shot me in the past affects this particular case.”

Skinner sighed, rubbing at his forehead. “I just don't want to cause any distress on the patient,” he said helplessly, apologetically. “You know that Ritter was dismissed from the Bureau because of the incident in New York, and I have no idea how he'll react to your presence, Scully.”

Scully swallowed painfully. “Ritter and I left it on good terms,” she said, which _she_ thought was true. He'd apologized over her bedside, remorseful behind a colorful bouquet of flowers, and she'd sent him a condolence card when she'd heard of his dismissal, which was about as good as she thought one could leave an encounter like theirs. (Mulder had disapproved of the card. “Don't feel bad for him,” he'd said with some disgust when he saw her inscribing it. “It's not your fault he doesn't know how to aim, or to survey the room instead of shooting blindly. It's _his_ fault that you have to recover from a bullet wound to the gut.” She replied stubbornly, “It was an accident,” but the wound, still not entirely healed, burned under her shirt. She'd kept the message brief and signed the card chastely: _Agent Scully._ ) But that was beside the point. She gritted her teeth, added, "Besides that, I believe he's unconscious at the moment, if I heard you correctly."

Skinner sighed again, surveying the lobby before looking back at her. “I'll talk to them,” he said quietly. “But only because I know you're not going to let up.”

“Not on this,” said Scully evenly, squaring her shoulders.

“No, I can't say I blame you.” Skinner met her eyes behind the lenses of his impeccably clean glasses. There seemed to be understanding between them. Scully nodded rigidly.

Twenty minutes later, she was standing beside Ritter's bed in the ICU. He was comatose, the way Skinner had described, the heart monitor beeping on point. Scully could see the bandages across his chest and deduced that the wound was in the center. But with one fatal flaw—not in the case of Ritter, but in the case of those who had wished him dead.

“They missed the heart,” she said.

On the other side of the mattress, a nurse checking Ritter's IV nodded, replied, “Nicked a ventricle, though. He lost a lot of blood before he was found, but the mechanics of the stab wound kept him from dying right away.”

The same error, Scully assumed, that had kept her alive in the forest. She looked down at Ritter. His face was white and still, his chest rising and falling with such slight movements that he appeared dead. She remembered the moment where their positions were switched: him profusely apologizing to her as she sat up in her hospital bed. He'd called her Dana. She remembered the moments after her shooting as if in a fog, when he'd held onto her hands and begged her to hang on. She had barely been lucid, but she remembered thinking, _You're not supposed to be the one here._ If she had to die, she didn't want to die with a near stranger holding her hand.

(She _hadn't_ wanted to die. In that moment, when the bullet had torn through her stomach, when the knife had shredded her side, she hadn't wanted to die. She didn't want to die. Not then, not now, not when there was so much left in life. But she hadn't wanted to live forever either. People don't plan their deaths, they don't daydream of the perfect way to go, but if forced to choose, she'd have said that she’d always wanted to go peacefully, and later in life. Not by a bullet through the abdomen or a knife to the side, not so soon, not when she had so much left unfinished. But there was a point in her life when she realized she didn't want to live forever, either, and it had come somewhere between her nightmares of Mulder bleeding out in her lap after a near-hostage situation in a bank and her mother’s car accident. She didn't want to be alone, to have forgotten the names of her loved ones, to have watched them all die and have to live with that eternally. That's what she had told Mulder the night on his couch. That's what he had gone looking for before they almost died in the forest: a way to prevent her from having to be alone forever. If she was even immortal.)

Looking down at Ritter's pale form, Scully wondered if he'd ever considered immortality. How he fit into this puzzle. All of this time, she'd been looking for a way to make all of this fit, but she had found nothing. And this was the closest she had come. Mulder, Ritter… aside from both being FBI agents at one time or another, the only thing that connected them was Scully. And perhaps the idea of immortality: Ritter had been on the Fellig case, Mulder was looking for the Fountain of Youth…

The idea took hold in Scully's mind like a flame at the end of a lighter, and only grew. All this time, she'd had no idea why she and Mulder had been targeted on this case—with little to no similarities between the majority of the victims, nothing consistent, she'd always just assumed that they'd been targets for a random reason, that they'd been observed when they were together in Tallahassee and that their captors had simply waited until they were vulnerable to strike. Never once had she considered that Mulder's ridiculous, stupidly sweet and utterly absurd quest had anything to do with the attack. The Fountain of Youth. How could a silly legend have anything to do with these horrible attacks, these horrible murders? But if immortality was the recurring theme…

Scully suddenly remembered something she'd noted on the case: one of the victims, the one that had sent her to Florida, had a connection to Fellig… Some time in between the blood-soaked moments in the woods and the saline-soaked moments in the hospital, she'd forgotten that. She'd dismissed it as a coincidence at the time, and afterwards, she'd been so focused on Mulder that she'd forgotten to consider herself as a fellow victim, to consider that she had a connection to at least one of the victims through Fellig.

“Will you call me if he wakes up?” Scully said out loud suddenly.

The nurse, who was busy checking Ritter's catheter, looked startled; maybe she'd thought Scully taking part in a silent vigil, the kind she usually kept at Mulder's bedside. “Sure,” she said gingerly. “Although he'll need to rest before any rounds of questioning…”

“Yes, of course,” Scully said impatiently, already on her way out of the room. She needed to look further into this Fellig connection, and she needed to do it right away.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warning for a very violent sequence mid-way through the chapter (something that has been referenced before in the story, but this is the scene in full).

**chapter three  
**

**_may, 1999_ **

Scully was gone when he woke up in the morning. She left a note informing him that she was headed to Baltimore to spend the weekend with her mother and brother. Mulder brushed his fingers over her signature briefly before turning to the coffee maker.

He was going back and forth in his mind about their conversation last night. In daylight, it sounded ridiculous: all an alcohol and tear-soaked confessional that they'd never speak of again. If he knew Scully at all, he knew that she was terribly embarrassed, that she'd never want to speak of it again. And maybe he should do the same. But it wouldn't stop nagging him, the whole thing. The way Scully had said, “I don't want to be alone.” And that was almost all the convincing he needed: Scully didn't want to be alone, and she'd asked him not to leave her alone. (It had reminded him too much of the nightmares that haunted him after the botched bank robbery, after the woman who said they died again and again before finally getting it right. He dreamed of Scully holding him as he bled out on the floor of the bank, whispering sternly not to leave her as if it were simply an assignment he  _absolutely had_  to focus on. Don't leave me, Mulder. Don't you dare leave me. Keep breathing. He'd wondered, more than once, if it was a memory. He wondered if Scully remembered, too.)

But. He couldn't assume. He needed to ask, and she'd never discuss it sober. Not Scully. He suspected that she'd left a note instead of waking him up to avoid talking in the wake of everything. And with the tension between them lately, what the hell was he thinking? Was he seriously considering looking for a way to live with Scully forever? They hadn't even kissed each other, much less made any other kind of commitment to each other. And on top of that, even if Scully was already in love, she wasn't necessarily in love with  _him_. It was too fucking romance novel. Not them. Not them at all.

It was ridiculous, so he tried to forget it, but something inside him wouldn't let it go. It kept sliding into his mind like a knife, distinct and relentless. What if. What if he didn't go looking and it all ended badly? What if he did and Scully hated him for it? What if she wasn't immortal? What if she was, but there was a way to take it away without her having to die? What if she was, but she didn't want to lose it? What if she wanted him to be with her? What if.

Eventually, he landed on a solution that seemed to be the best possible one. The least he could do was look. For something, some proof of immortality. And if he found something? Well, from then on, it'd be Scully's decision. Whatever needed to happen. Whether he found a way to gain immortality or lose it. As long as she knew he was willing to sacrifice his mortality, if she wanted to. As long as it was an option. As long as it was out there.

Mulder went into the office, not entirely sure which option he was looking for. He didn't know that it mattered. He read the Fellig file again and again, did research for hours, making phone calls, combing through records, looking for anything he'd missed before.

\---

On Sunday, he looked through the X-Files for any mentions of immortality. A few here and there, but they seemed to be largely linked to vampirism, and he had no desire to drink blood for the rest of his life. And most of the others were vague, annoyingly lacking in answers. Fucking unexplained phenomenon.

It wasn't until the end of the day, when he came across the Apalachicola National Forest file. The conquistador mothmen thing.

Something flickered through Mulder's mind at that moment, something he'd said to one of the dorky agents just after the case had ended. _Ponce De Leon came here 450 years ago looking for the Fountain Of Youth,_  he'd said. _After 400 years in the woods don’t you think they might have adapted perfectly to their environment?_

He’d only been half-serious, but on the way back from the case in Florida, that annoying guy, Whatshisname, had asked Mulder from the front seat, “So those… things… do you really think they're Spanish conquistadors? Ponce De Leon?”

“Ponce De Leon died in Cuba,” Scully said with some weary amusement, next to to him in the backseat.

Mulder nudged her with his elbow, saying, “I believe that some of the conquistadors might still be out there in the woods, yes.”

“Yeah, but…” Whatshisname had looked back, pulling at his collar. (Mulder wondered why he could remember these details so well, but not the annoying guy's name. Selective memory, he supposed.) “Are they the  _original_ conquistadors? Cause they can't be the descendants, right, cause you said they evolved. But then, how would they have survived out there for so long, if they were just humans?”

Mulder had opened his mouth to answer, but Scully jumped in with that same amusement, ribbing him: “Maybe they found what they were looking for,” she said with amusement. “Maybe they found the Fountain of Youth.”

She'd been kidding, but the joke loomed large in Mulder's mind as he looked down at the file.  _What if they had?_  he thought, pulling the file free.  _What if they had?_

The gravity of the situation didn't completely dawn on him until Scully called him that night. He was flipping through the file when the phone rang, and he answered it with an absent, “Mulder,” as he studied the pictures of the cavern where they'd found the victims.

“Mulder, it's me,” Scully said on the other end. “I'm just calling to tell you that I'm not coming into work tomorrow.”

He'd been tapping the eraser of his pencil against his teeth, and he let it drop when he heard that. “What's wrong? Is your mom okay?” he asked.

She sighed on the other end. “Yeah, she's, she's… she's fine, Mulder. She said thank you for the card. I've been called out to Tallahassee, actually.”

He blinked in surprise. “Seriously?”

“Yes. NYPD officer Natalie Walker has been found murdered,” said Scully.

“NYPD officer?”

“Yes, from the 15th Street Precinct. She was abducted three days ago from New York City and found in the park in Tallahassee this morning. The Bureau is panicked that a cop is a victim, so they're calling me down to investigate now, see if I can find anything they haven't so they can catch this guy."

“15th Street Precinct. Why does that sound familiar, Scully?” he asked, picking up the pencil.

Scully sighed. “It was the precinct we worked out of on the Fellig case,” she said. 

He dropped the pencil again in astonishment, caught off guard. “The Fellig case?” he repeated numbly. “Did you… did you know Natalie Walker?”

“Not really, Ritter and I talked to her concerning Fellig, since she usually collected his crime scene photos when he worked with them…”

“So she had a direct connection to Fellig,” said Mulder. Right when he was researching immortality, ways to live forever. Of fucking course.

“This case has nothing to do with Fellig, Mulder,” said Scully, a bit impatiently. “It's a case. It's my job. We're leaning more on the NYPD connection, since Kenneth Rigby was a retired NYPD officer. I leave tomorrow. I just wanted to let you know that I’d be gone.”

The pencil had rolled off of the desk and on to the floor. Mulder poked it with his toe dejectedly. And then something occurred to him:  _Tallahassee is very close to the forest where we found the mothmen,_  he thought.  _Near where the Fountain of Youth might be._

“Hey, Scully,” he said out loud, mind racing. Two good things could come out of going to Tallahassee with her: being able to have her back on the case, and having a chance to look into the Fountain on its home turf. “Why don't you let me come with you?”

“Mulder, you're not on the case,” she started tiredly.

“Yeah, but that doesn't mean I can't tag along and offer you my off-the-record opinion,” he said. The pencil rolled again under the toe of his shoe. “You know. Covertly. As a friend.” He raised his eyebrows suggestively before he remembered that she couldn’t see him.

“Right.” Scully's tone was knowing, but otherwise unreadable. He thought, just for a second, about telling her what he was doing. “Are you coming because of me? Because you're still stuck on this idea that I'm going to get hurt?” she asked, a little defensively. “Or is it because you think this case is an X-File?”

The pencil rolled out of reach. Mulder cocked his hip against the edge of the desk. “Well,” he offered gingerly. “There are a lot of unexplained aspects, aren't there?”

Scully's sigh was answer enough. “Mulder…”

“Honestly, Scully?” he asked, trying to sound sincere. To make her understand. “It's because you're my partner, and I want to work with you. I think with my background, I could be a big help to you. And besides that, if I show up and just start talking, you never know. They might just let me stay.”

Scully snorted on the other end, but he could tell she was softened by what he'd said. He felt a sudden rush of guilt over the fact that he was, in part, lying to her.

“You'd probably get caught,” she said softly.

“I wouldn't get caught,” Mulder said valiantly. “I have some vacation time stocked up anyway. And besides… I could always hide out in your motel room,” he offered suggestively.

He could hear the eye roll over the phone. “You're definitely going to get caught,” she told him.

He raised his eyebrows. “So that means I can come?”

Scully groaned a little on the other end. “You're also going to get me fired someday. You know that, right?”

“So what else is new?” he said, chuckling a little.

Scully sighed, and he could picture her wherever she was, rubbing her temples exhaustedly. “Know that I don't approve,” she said. “But. If you do insist on coming along. I'm flying in this evening, so you'll need to wait until the morning. I'll call you with the name of the motel. Go straight there. I'll have requested a double room.”

He smiled at the pencil where it had rolled out of reach. “Hey, Scully?”

“Yes?”

“Thanks.”

“Don't get caught, Mulder,” she told him sternly.

“I never get caught,” he protested.

“You always get caught,” she informed him smugly.

“Never,” he intoned.

Rustling of her hair against the phone, like she was shaking her head, and then she said, “I'll see you later, Mulder.” The phone clicked as she hung up.

Mulder flopped into his desk chair, setting the phone on top of the desk, and put his feet up on the desk. His shoes brushed against the stack of files from the Tallahassee Stabbings. He'd look over them again on the plane, he promised himself, if Scully didn't come by and get them on her way to the airport. He grabbed the mothmen file and flipped it open. _If it's real,_  he told himself.  _If it's real, I'm going to find it._

\---

**_october, 1999_ **

Skinner wanted her to go to a motel and get some rest. Scully went straight to the Tallahassee field office to retrieve the files on the victims. She was tired, but she didn’t want to waste any time.

On the way, she stopped in a parking lot, pulled the file she'd been slowly building since Mulder disappeared out and dug around in it. Aside from the collected statements, crime scene photos, reports of the investigating officers, she'd also gathered up anything Mulder had done in the months before his disappearance. Bundled with printouts of immortality legends  (including the Fountain of Youth), she'd found notes of his, including a list of Fellig’s aliases. She dug through the file until she found the crumpled list, dumped the folder on the seat beside her and stuffed it in her pocket.

In the midst of the pile of paper, a photo of Mulder stuck out, pinned to the Missing Persons report. Scully's eyes shifted over to it for a moment, and she shivered; it was unusual, this feeling of unfamiliarity when she looked at him, like she was getting used to his absence. She told herself firmly that she wasn't, couldn't be, stared at the image until she couldn’t anymore.  _I'm going to find you,_  she told the photo silently. Brushed her thumb over his face as she flipped the top of the folder down before pulling out of the parking lot. Swallowed the lump in her throat.

At the field office, it was getting late, but there was someone she recognized still at his desk. The lead agent from Tallahassee assigned to work with the DC agents on the task force, an Agent Miles Kravert. He looked up, startled, when she entered, flashing her badge. “Agent Scully,” he greeted her, without surprise but with some small amount of fondness. They'd become something of friends, first in the original case and then in the initial search for Mulder. Acquaintances, friendly coworkers in the stilted way that she and Mulder had never had. He'd called her every week with updates until the investigation had fizzled out. He stood, now, and extended his hand towards her. “Good to see you again after all this time. AD Skinner mentioned you'd be coming down.”

Scully nodded politely, shaking his hand. “I saw Ritter,” she said. “Looks pretty bad.”

“Yeah,” Kravert said quietly, and she knew immediately that he was thinking of her. She was originally the sole survivor of these killers. No longer. “We're hoping he might be able to add a little more to your story, give us a fuller picture.”

She remembered the faces of the men who'd tried to kill them exactly, had described them to a sketch artist in her hospital room. The problem was how vague they were, and how little else she knew; they had a description, but no specifics. And since the murders had stopped after the attack, there'd been nothing to compare with. They'd shown the sketches to the families or neighbors of the victims, and most had remembered no one like that around the time of the abduction. A few had been able to place the face, but had absolutely no idea who the men were. Unfortunately, Scully's blood-tinged memories were just another dead end.

She nodded at Kravert again, said, “I was wondering if I could borrow the files from the other victims. The ones that came before… me and Mulder.” She cleared her throat uncomfortably. It still hurt to acknowledge that she and Mulder were victims. Another near-trophy on the wall of another maniac. “There were some things I'd like to check up on,” she said.

“Like what?” Kravert asked, standing from his desk and starting towards the back.

Scully followed him, swallowing painfully before she spoke. “You know that… Peyton Ritter was a former FBI agent,” she said. “Dismissed from the Bureau in January of this year.”

“Yeah, right,” said Kravert, hunched over his desk as he dug through files.

“Well…” Scully swallowed again. It was still painful to say. She felt hyper-aware of the bullet wound on her belly. “He was dismissed due to an incident that occurred on a case,” she began to explain. “A case that I was also on. He took down a suspect, an Alfred Fellig, and unintentionally injured me in the process.”

Kravert turned around, his eyebrows raising. “So there's a connection between you and Peyton Ritter? Shit, Scully, that's… do you think that's why you two are the only ones who lived?”

Scully shook her head. “There's more,” she said. “Remember the victim from the NYPD? Natalie Walker? The one we thought was connected to former NYPD officer Kenneth Rigby?” Kravert nodded. Scully exhaled slowly before continuing. “At the time, I noticed that Walker was Alfred Fellig’s contact. He was a crime scene photographer for the NYPD, and he primarily communicated with Walker.”

“Shit,” Kravert said again, reaching up go rub his forehead. “So that means that you and Ritter and Natalie Walker… you all had this man Fellig in common?”

“Yes,” said Scully. “He's dead now, of course… I just realized it today, when I made the connection between myself and Ritter, I can't believe I didn't think about it before now. I guess I brushed it off as a coincidence because it had been so long since the Fellig case…”

(She pointedly didn't mention the immortality connection, the link between Fellig’s claims and Mulder's search. No one would believe her, and it would just paint Mulder in a bad light.)

Kravert was still rubbing at his forehead, a look of relief on his face. “Damn, Scully,” he said in a breath. “This is… this is the first solid lead we've had. So you want to look for this Fellig guy, see if he had connections to the other victims?”

She nodded, pulled the wrinkly list out of her pocket and passed it to him. “Mulder did some research on the case when I was assigned to it,” she said, which was true. “Fellig was something of an enigma, with a variety of identities. Here's a list of all the aliases we know for sure he used. I can give you all the information I have on the case in the morning. If you wouldn't mind checking for this…”

He took the paper from her solemnly. “And what are you planning on doing with these files?” he asked, motioning towards the room where they kept old files.

Scully shrugged. “More or less the same,” she said. “Any connections I can find.”

\---

_She isn't sure what happens between her attack in her motel room and waking up. All she knows is that she comes to sprawled across the back seat of a car. She might note that at least it isn't the trunk, if she felt like looking on the bright side. But she doesn't, and she's fairly certain she's just been abducted by the serial killer she's been looking for. Her hands are taped behind her back, a strip of tape over her mouth, and all she can think of is the duct tape residue found on the victims. The victims that she actually autopsied, the reports she spent hours reading._

_She panics first by instinct, kicking out at the seat in front of her and yanking her hands apart, trying to separate them, to loosen her bonds. The tape has no give, wound too tightly around her wrists. Her heart thumps hard and frantic behind her ribs, her breaths come shallow and panicked. She twists in an attempt to sit up, and looks out the window._

_She's in the woods, the same woods that she and Mulder found themselves in two years ago, on their way to a fucking teamwork conference. She recognizes it somehow, will never forget the night she spent listening to Mulder breathe softly, on edge and waiting for a monster to descend from the woods. Mothmen and Florida humidity. The car is parked in a clearing, trees crowded around on all sides. A man is standing beside the car, smoking a cigarette. When he turns and sees Scully looking at him, he smiles wide and toothy, putting the cigarette out on the side of the car. He reaches down and yanks the door open._

_Acting on pure instinct, Scully scuttles back across the seat, away from her captor. The tape over her mouth is suffocating, she can’t catch her breath. “No, you don't,” the strange man says, and he grabs her by the ankle and hauls her across the leather. She tries to ram her knee into his stomach, but feels the bite of metal at her neck before she can make her move. “The fun is just beginning,” says her captor gleefully. There's a certain quality to his voice, one that absurdly reminds Scully of old movies, but his words make her shudder from head to toe. She wants to flinch away, to hit this guy in the face._

_She tries to meet her abductor’s eyes, to look for some kind of sympathy or common ground, something with which to negotiate, but he won't look at her. He jerks her out of the car, pinning her back against his chest with an arm to the neck. Scully winces, stumbling numbly to her feet, trying to take even breaths through her nose. She doesn't struggle, doesn't try to wriggle away. If she stays calm, approaches this with a clear head and tries to rationalize with this man, she may have a chance at escape. (She hates that she has instincts in this situation, that it’s happened enough that she knows what to do. A memory flickers briefly in her mind, Mulder’s voice calling out for her just before it all went black, and she prays that he is looking for her now, that he can find her before they start.)_

_“My sons are on the way here,” says the man from behind her, running the tip of his blade across her collarbone gently. A curved blade, she realizes, like the one used on the victims. Her blood feels like ice water, freezing her with terror from head to toe.“With a friend of yours, I believe.”_

_Panic courses through her like ice water as she takes in this information, tries to process it:_  Friend? What friend?  _But she knows. She knows before she even sees him._

_She hears the edge of a familiar voice, hovering on the edges of the trees. And then he appears at the edge of the clearing. Mulder, with a knife at his chest (the same kind of curved knife), being shuffled along with his hands taped together in front of him. His mouth isn't taped, and he's protesting loudly, demanding to know what's going on, until he sees her. His face whitens, his eyes going wide, his words disappearing mid-sentence. She swallows nervously behind the glue stuck over her lips. “Scully?” he stammers. He stumbles as he's forced forward, frozen, his toes dragging in the dirt._

_“She mentioned you two knew each other,” says the man with his arm around her neck. He sounds satisfied. Scully has no idea what he's talking about; unless she's just forgotten things, she hasn't said a word to this man. She wouldn't, not if Mulder's safety was thrown into question. Never._

_“What the hell is she doing here?” Mulder snaps, eyes wide with terror. He thrashes against the men he's pinned between, trying to pull away. “What do you want with her?”_

_Her captor runs the side of the blade over the curve of her throat, and Mulder's teeth clench. “Same we want with you, Mr. Mulder,” he says._

_“Let her go,” Mulder hisses through his teeth. “Don't you lay a fucking hand on her.”_

_One of the men holding Mulder laughs, shoves him into the other and reaches into his jacket pocket, pulling out a roll of silver duct tape. The other man holds Mulder in place. Scully's captor runs the knife across her throat again, knicking her a little just under the chin. A small dot of blood drips down her throat and she flinches a little at the sudden sting. “Let her go,” Mulder says, frantic, straining against the arms holding him back. “You can have me, take me, do whatever you want with me, just let her go.”_

_Scully frantically blurts his name, shaking her head wildly as pure instinct takes over, and his eyes turn to meet hers. There is meaning in the look they exchange. She shakes her head again, says his name again under the tape, tries to say everything she needs to say with her eyes. He opens his mouth to speak again, but a strip of the tape is pressed over his mouth before he can. “Time to be quiet,” says the man who does it, a little smugly. “No trades in this game, I'm afraid.”_

_This is it. These are the serial killers she's been looking for, she found them. And they are going to kill them, her and Mulder. There's no way out, they can't stop them. He isn’t coming for her and she isn’t coming for him. They are in this together._

_Mulder holds her gaze, eyes dark and desperate, pleading, terrified. There are too many things she wants to say to him._

_She decides in a split second; shoves off of her captor with bound hands and moves her foot to collide with his crotch. He groans with pain, his arms falling away from her, and she runs.  No thoughts in her head except for taking the attention away from Mulder; since his hands are in front of him, if she can cause enough of a distraction he could possibly get one of the knives…_

_But she makes it no further than a few steps before they have her. They hold her in place, hands like steel bands on her shoulders. Scully thrashes, determined not to give up, kicks at their ankles and tries to yank away._

_“Feisty thing,” intones the voice of her captor. Pained, but deeply serious. She feels the metal of the blade through the cotton of her shirt. “It's really unfortunate.”_

_Scully struggles harder, an elbow to the stomach. Mulder makes a muffled sound. Their eyes meet. So many things she wants to say._

_The knife goes into her side before she can flinch away, sinking in and twisting._

_Mulder shouts behind the tape, struggling furiously against the arms restraining him. Scully tries to twist out of the grip she's being held in, but the knife goes in again. And again. The pain makes her weak. She grunts into the tape, limp in the grip of her captor. Her gaze shifts frantically around, finally landing on Mulder again. His eyes are large and wet, staring at her as he pulls against his restraints, his bound hands scrabbling at the arm holding him back, scratching. She starts to say his name, though there'd be no way he'd understand it. Mulder._

_And then the knife sinks into her side again._

_Her knees give out, buckling underneath her, and she collapses on the ground, on the hard dirt and leaves. Mulder moans something that might be her name. She struggles to take breaths, but with her mouth covered, sticky glue sticking to her wet lips, she can only breathe through her nose. Hot pain dancing through her, hot blood seeping out. She can't breathe._

_Mulder yanks hard against the arms holding him back, and for some reason, they let him go. He collapses on his knees beside her, his bound hands fumbling to press against her weeping side. He cannot speak. He looks at her, his eyes round with concern and wet with tears. He awkwardly presses his fingers against the wounds, trying to staunch the flow._

_The man who was restraining Mulder is chuckling. He steps forward and seizes him under the armpits, hauling him backwards. Mulder pulls against the hold, heels scraping across the forest floor. His hands are slick with her blood. He flops helplessly in their grasp like a rag doll._

_“She was right,” the faceless man says, pinning Mulder with an arm across the chest. “They are close.” There's a sudden blade at his neck, pressing in, and Scully doesn't have time to protest. Their eyes meet, briefly, before the knife sinks into his throat._

Scully bolted, shoving at the covers, fingers scraping at the mattress. It took her a minute, two to realize where she was. Not in the woods. Not in danger. In bed, alone.

Breathing hard, Scully curled on her side and reached underneath the covers, slid her hand under the hem of her shirt and felt the scars along her side. 1999 had not be kind to her, between the gunshot wound and the stab wounds and everything fucking else. Her mother had wanted her to abstain from field work completely. She'd been saying that after she found Mulder, she would think about it. There were times when she felt like she’d had enough, like she really couldn’t do it anymore.

Phantom pain lingered in her side—no actual pain, but the memory of it. The feeling of a blade tearing through skin and muscle like paper. And Mulder. Mulder with a long red line carved across his throat. Mulder struggling to breathe. Mulder pressing his hands into her side, trying to keep her from bleeding out. The last time he'd ever touch her.

Scully rolled over in bed, pressing her face into the pillow. She'd tried to deny the fact of that night, and she couldn't deny it any longer. Every time she remembered it, every time she dreamed it, she saw the whole thing all over again: Mulder getting his throat slit. She had told herself over and over again that she could have imagined it, she'd lost a lot of blood and passed out right after, it could be a hallucination…

But there was no denying it. She'd seen it a million times: the man holding Mulder down, the way he smiled merrily before moving the knife. Scully had watched her partner's throat be cut, and she didn't know if there was any way to come back from that. Any way to survive it.

So why did she keep insisting that Mulder was alive?

She hadn't wanted to think about this. Hadn't wanted to even consider the possibility. But she saw no other choice. If she was going to continue looking for a living, breathing Mulder instead of a body, then she had to have good reason to justify that search. Because all logic told her that Mulder should be dead right now. The only reason—the stupidest, most illogical reason—that Mulder might still be alive was if he'd found what he was looking for. If he'd found a way to never die.

It wasn't that she didn't want to believe. She wanted more than anything to believe. But something inside her would not fully let her. This nagging feeling in the pit of her stomach:  _There's no such thing as a Fountain of Youth. Mulder is dead. You know what you saw, and he is dead. It's a miracle you survived._  She couldn't let it go. This skeptical voice in her head never completely left her, and she hated it. As much as Mulder must have hated it. She couldn't stay on the X-Files if she never found him, because she would never be able to do what he did. She didn't have it in her.

Scully pressed her face harder into the pillow. Tried to erase the images of Mulder dead. Clenched her teeth and shut her eyes.

\---

She flipped through the files over breakfast. Connection between Natalie Walker and Fellig noted. She pulled the top off of a muffin and chewed a mouthful as she read through the Stan Jameson file. The aliases that Mulder had noted flitted through her head absently, until she came across the Janet Rice file and the names in her mind solidified, one in particular sticking out. Janet Rice. L.H. Rice, she remembered, was Fellig’s earliest alias. She wondered if Janet was a distant relative of sorts, scribbled a note in the file.

By the time she had finished her cup of coffee, she had reached the Virginia Barclay file. The first victim. Her breath caught, just slightly, when she saw Mulder's slanting scrawl when she opened the file. The notes he'd written for her months ago, suggesting things to investigate.

The first note was about looking for similar murders in Tallahassee. She'd passed the suggestion on to the task force months ago, and it hadn't lead anywhere. The second note was concerning the fact that Virginia Barclay’s body had been stolen. The only stolen body. The only stolen body until Mulder disappeared.

Scully put down the file and rubbed her hand over her face. Compared to the other murders, the attack on her and Mulder did not fit the M.O. They had been wounded with the same knife as the others, but everything else differed, because neither of them had been dumped in the park. And the fact that she had survived. They were the most similar to the two outliers in the string of murders and attacks, Ritter and Barclay, and both of those victims had been dumped in the park.

So what was the difference? Why were she and Ritter the only survivors? Was it pure dumb luck or on purpose? Why hadn't she been dumped in the park? How had she managed to escape? Where was Mulder? Had he escaped, too, or was he being held captive? Or was he dead and his captors didn't want him to be found? Why keep Mulder (or Mulder's body) and not hers? Why had the killers dumped Barclay only to steal her body again? Was it to send a warning to the police? But why only steal Barclay’s body back? What was the point? What was the goddamn point?

Scully rubbed her temples, closing her eyes. God, she just wanted this to be over. She wanted her partner back. She stood, throwing away the muffin wrapper and scraping her leftover eggs into the trash can. She walked back to her room, her hands balled up in her pockets.

She was on her way out the door when Kravert called. “Scully, I got it,” he said, sounding wired. Excited. “I found a connection to the guy. Your Fellig guy, all of his aliases. There's a visible connection to every victim except for Virginia Barclay. I'm doing more research on her, it doesn't look like she has any records. But I found it! I found our connection.”

Scully sagged with relief. Virginia Barclay, the eternal outlier. But still, thus was the best lead they'd gotten since Mulder disappeared. Since  _before_ Mulder disappeared. “I'm on my way,” she said into the phone.


	4. Chapter 4

**chapter four**

**_may, 1999_ **

Mulder got to Tallahassee at ten in the morning and drove straight to the motel room that Scully directed him to. There were two beds, as promised, Scully's suitcase zipped up on top of the one closest to the door; he sprawled across the other bed, shoving his suitcase to the edge. He unzipped it and rummaged around for the folder of information he'd gathered on the legend of the Fountain of Youth.

His cell phone rang and he answered, sandwiching the phone between his cheek and his shoulder as he flipped through printouts that he'd printed out at the Gunmen's the night before. “Mulder.”

“Mulder, it's me,” said Scully on the other end. “Are you in Tallahassee?”

“Yeah, I'm in the double room,” he said. “You picked a shitty vacation spot, Scully, it's hotter than hell.”

He was joking, but it was hard to tell if she was amused or not over the phone. “This is hardly a vacation here, Mulder,” she said finally, matter-of-factly. “Maybe for you, but not for me. I am in between autopsies—the full examination of Natalie Walker and the second examination of Kenneth Rigby—to see if I can find anything the other coroner didn't. And to make matters worse, I skipped breakfast this morning.”

“Did you find anything in the autopsy?” Mulder offered.

She sighed. “Nothing new compared to the other examinations… I looked over the reports this morning. Some of the victims showed traces of a drug in their system, supposedly from their abduction, while others showed signs of being hit in the head from behind to subdue them. Natalie Walker, for example, was hit from behind. But there's no pattern in the variation between drugs and head trauma.”

Her voice was weary enough that he could picture what she was doing: leaning against the silver table, goggles stuck in her hair, rubbing her eyes with a bare hand while she held her glove in the other one. “You sound exhausted, Scully,” he said.

“I'm fine, Mulder. It's only mid-day. I'm just hungry.”

“Why don't you let me bring you a sandwich?” he offered, letting the photos drop on the bed. “You can eat, we can go over the results…”

“Mulder, no,” she said immediately. “You're not supposed to be here, remember?”

“That would've been a solid argument when we were under Kersh, but we're back under Skinner now, remember?” he pointed out, swinging his legs off of the bed. “Besides, who's gonna be upset if I show up?”

“Kersh,” she said. “Kersh, who is heading this investigation, will be upset if you show up. He'll report you, and Mulder, with your current record, this might be the straw that breaks the camel's back. You could lose your job—not to mention I could lose mine if they found out I gave you permission to be here and let you stay in my motel room. We're on thin ice as it is."

He considered, for a brief moment, suggesting that they pretend to be dating so he'd have a valid reason for bringing her food and staying in her room. But he knew exactly how well that idea would go over. He said instead, “Who's there now?”

“The local coroner, who I've been communicating with about the autopsy results, and the leader of the Tallahassee Bureau’s end of the task force, who picked up the original case. This guy is the one who called the guys from DC in when he hit multiple dead ends,” said Scully. “But, Mulder…”

“No one from DC,” he offered. “No one to ask any questions.”

Scully groaned behind her hand. “You're going to get caught, Mulder,” she mumbled.

“I am not going to get caught.” He was pulling his shoes on. “Where's the morgue?”

The phone clicked as she hung up.

Mulder shrugged, grabbing his wallet and the folder with all of the information on the Fountain. He actually had an idea of what he wanted to do with the lead he already had.

\---

A short guy in a suit was pacing through the room when Mulder entered. Scully, hunched over the slab with a bloody scalpel in hand, shot him a look of annoyance which he answered with an innocent shrug.

“Who's this?” the suit-guy asked.

“This,” said Scully, peeling off her gloves and dropping them on the table, “is my partner from Washington, Mulder. Agent Mulder, this is Agent Miles Kravert, who has been on the case from the beginning. And I think Mulder has brought me lunch.”

She pulled the sheet over the body of the man on the slab, apparently intending to take a break and eat. Mulder wrinkled his nose in disgust. “I don't understand how you can…  _eat_ in the middle of that,” he commented.

“Yes, well,” Scully said tensely as she came to meet him, “I'm not the one who puts evidence in my mouth, Mulder.”

Agent Kravert snorted as Scully took her sandwich. "So, Agent Mulder,” he said, turning to address Mulder. “Do you have any thoughts on the case?”

Scully eyed him uncertainly, taking a bite of her sandwich. Mulder cleared his throat, said, “Well, I've been looking into the Virginia Barclay factor, trying to figure out why she was the only victim whose body disappeared.”

“Right, that's been a tough one for me, too,” Kravert said. “I mean, it might be because we increased security on the morgue after we found Janet Rice with similar wounds, but we were also subtle because we'd hoped to catch the murderer in the act of stealing the body. But no one even attempted to break in.”

“Suggests there was something different about her,” Mulder said. “Something special.”

“Maybe Virginia was the original target,” Kravert offered. “And whoever stalked and killed her liked how it felt, so he continued to abduct people to ride that high. But he didn't care about them, not the same way he cared about Virginia, so he was willing to let their bodies go.”

“That's good thinking,” Mulder said. “But then why bother to go so far to find random victims that didn't matter? What was the point? If he just did it to ride the high, why go so far out of his way? He could've done it to avoid suspicion, but then he likely would've disposed of the bodies in different ways so as not to attract attention.”

“I guess that's the question, isn't it,” said Kravert.

Scully cleared her throat, balling up the wax paper from her sandwich in her fist. “One factor is that Virginia’s body was stolen before an examination could be conducted,” she said. “The only thing we know for certain about her murder is that her throat was slit, and that she was dumped in the same place as all the others.”

Kravert groaned, rubbing at his forehead. “The question just remains: why would there be something to hide about Virginia Barclay versus the following victims?” he asked of no one in particular.

“It's a possibility,” Mulder offered, “that Virginia Barclay may be a victim of a different killer, and every victim after that was murdered by a copycat killer. We can't be sure that the same weapon was used in Virginia’s murder as the others; all we know for sure is that she was found in the same way as the others, and that all the victims had knife wounds, right?”

Kravert’s eyes lit up a little bit. “Not a bad theory,” he said, clearly impressed. “I have to get going, I'm interviewing Walker's relatives, but will I see you later at the Bureau?”

Scully shot him a look of smug annoyance as she threw her trash away. Mulder shrugged uncomfortably. “Uh, I'm not actually officially on this case,” he said. “I'm working on another case in the area, and I thought I'd drop in and bring Scully something to eat. Offer my insight on the case, since I've been following it more or less.”

“Mulder's a profiler,” Scully offered, although not without her share of irritation. “I asked him to take a look as a favor to me.”

“I'm surprised you didn't get this assignment,” Kravert said, looking between them.

Mulder shrugged again. “The agent in charge isn't a fan.”

Kravert raised his eyebrows. “Well, I've got to go,” he said, “but I appreciate your insight, Agent Mulder.” He pulled a card out of the pocket of his coat and passed it to Mulder. “This case has been breaking my back these past few months, and I'd appreciate anything you can come up with.”

Mulder took the card, something of sympathy in his mind. He knew what it was like to be stuck on a case forever, no answer in sight and people just kept dying. He knew what it was like to be lost in the mind of a killer. He felt sorry for the guy. “I'll take a look and give you a call if I come up with anything further,” he said.

“Thanks. Uh, talk to you later, Agent Scully?”

Scully had her gloves back on and was pulling back the sheet over Kenneth Rigby. “I'll call you with the results,” she said.

“Thank you.” Kravert was already most of the way out of the door. He offered a little wave on his way out.

Scully was going back to her autopsy, wrist-deep inside the incision. “You're doing an excellent job of not attracting attention, Mulder,” she said.

“Don't you have that tape thingy running?” Mulder waved his hand at the tape recorder. “That seems like something that would blow my cover.”

“First of all, you have no cover, and second of all, I'm the only one who ever listens to these.” She selected some sharp-looking tool from the table beside her. “Were you serious about looking the case over and calling Kravert?”

“Yeah, why not? I came down here to help you out on the case, remember?” He leaned against the edge of another metal table.

Scully looked up at him, her blue eyes piercing through the grimy lenses of her goggles. “This is a pretty serious case, Mulder,” she said seriously. “Natalie Walker died from multiple stab wounds to her abdomen and chest. Very brutal.”

Mulder swallowed roughly as he remembered the other methods of death. Virginia Barclay and Kenneth Rigby both had slit throats. Janet Rice had severe stab wounds to her side. Oliver Alexander had stab wounds to the torso resulting in near disembowelment. Stan Jameson had stab wounds to the back, some nearly severing his spine. All of these people had died slowly and painfully.

“These people deserve closure,” Scully continued. “I've been hoping that you being here will help us find the person who's been doing this.”

The guilt at coming here to find the Fountain of Youth, for Scully, and covering it up with offering to help with the case, rose in his throat again. “That's what I want,” he said.

Scully nodded in agreement, hair tumbling out of the band of her goggles. “You have something to reference?” she asked.

“Yeah, I took notes on the general details of the case,” he said. “I don’t know how far I can get on the Virginia Barclay was a different killer theory, but I can try to get a profile going on the person who definitely murdered the other victims. If you could get me a copy of the autopsy results, that'd be helpful.”

“Sure.” She leaned back over the body. “I can do that. Meet you back at the motel tonight?”

“Sure,” he said. “Call me if you need anything, okay?”

Scully nodded absently, absorbed in her work. He watched her, just for a moment, before turning around and heading back outside.

\---

He called a zoologist on the way back to the motel, who he'd consulted with after the mothman case. He wanted to study the animals, find out how they ticked. If his theory of evolved Spanish conquistadors was accurate. The zoologist, Dr. Decker, had been studying the body of the mothman that Scully had shot, but apparently the body had disappeared before she could conduct a full examination. Mulder had always planned to follow up with results, but with everything that had happened in late 1997 and early 1998, he'd completely forgotten. He arranged a meeting time for later in the afternoon, went back to the motel and tried to start a profile over lunch. He couldn't come up with anything outside of a few scrawling notes. This killer seemed to be a blank space in the world, nameless and faceless and nothing to suggest why he did what he did.

He met Dr. Decker later that day, who confirmed what he had assumed: she'd noted that the creatures had a bone structure that suggested a similar origin to humans, but it was unclear if the origin  _was_ humans, or if it was simply a coincidence, especially since she hadn't gotten a chance to fully examine the body. He asked her if she thought it was a possibility they could be evolved humans who got stuck out in the woods for hundreds of years, and the woman shrugged. “There's really no telling,” she said, “especially since I have so few resources to go on, and since I never got to do a full examination. But human lifespans would make that an impossibility, Agent Mulder.”

That was what he'd thought. That was why he assumed that some of Ponce De Leon’s men had found what they were looking for. Evolution did its work to help them survive in the woods, and the Fountain of Youth did its work to keep their heart beating.

(There was the question of how the mothman had died if it was rendered immortal by the Fountain, but Mulder had his suspicions about the body disappearing. Maybe, like Leonard Betts, the body had woken up and walked out.)

Mulder went back to the motel after the meeting. Scully was already there when he got to the room, listening to a recording of her autopsies as she typed on her laptop. “Hey,” he said as he closed the door behind him.

“Hey.” She reached out and pressed pause on the recording, halting her steady voice. “Where'd you go? I thought you were going to work on a profile.”

“I did start on one. I, uh, I actually had a meeting with a colleague today,” he said, sitting on the edge of the bed.

“A colleague? In Tallahassee? Mulder, you didn't go to the Bureau, did you?” she asked wearily, getting to her feet and turning to face him.

“No, it was with that zoologist, Dr. Decker; remember her? I wanted to follow up on those predators we found in the forest near here a couple years ago.”

Her eyebrows raised. “The mothmen, Mulder, really? I thought you came down here to help me on this case.”

“I did,” he said hurriedly. "I just, you know, couldn't do much work on the profile without a lot of information, so I thought I'd check out that old lead while I waited for your autopsy results.”

Now Scully looked a little irritable. “Mulder, you're a profiler,” she said. “This is what you're good at.” He suddenly found himself questioning why the hell he didn't just tell her what he was doing, thinking maybe he should tell her the other reason why he came down here. But she was still talking. “I don't know, Mulder… if you  _insist_ on being here, I think you should just tell Kersh when you get a theory and see if he'll let you work it. Maybe you could get Kravert to vouch for you, see if that helps…”

Mulder swallowed. Maybe it was a good idea to get on the case, but if he did that, then there was no way that he'd have any time to search for the Fountain. It was a selfish thought, but it was the first thing that came to mind. And then there were more serious things: pissing off Kersh, his and Scully's job at risk… “I don't know,” he said. “Do you really think it's a good idea?”

Scully shrugged. “It's the best explanation I can think of as to why you should stay. If you're just going to be hanging around the motel room, picking through files and waiting for me to bring you scraps of evidence…”

“Why don't we take a look tonight?” he offered, because it was the only thing he could come up with. “See if I can find anything that hasn't been found before.”

Scully wriggled her foot against the carpet, doubt written on her face. “And if you don't?”

“We'll talk about it then,” he said.

He was, actually, hoping for some lead on this case, some factor that hadn't been found. Something that would free him up to look for the Fountain, tell Scully what was going on and either convince her to come along or leave her behind without worrying about her. He wanted this case to be solved, he wanted justice for these people. But it had only been a few days since Scully's confession on his couch. He couldn't put it out of his mind.

Scully sighed heavily, shoulders slumping. “Fine,” she said. “I have to finish typing this up, though.” She sat back down and pressed Play on the recorder without another word. Mulder got the sense that she was annoyed with him. He sat quietly on the bed and waited for her to finish, listening to her voice describe the autopsy of Natalie Walker and the reexamination of Kenneth Rigby with steady precision.

\---

They spent hours going over the case on Mulder's bed. Scully ordered a pizza and they ate it on the shitty bedspread of Scully's bed, cross-legged with the box in between them. Mulder's eyes went bleary with facts about the victims.

In the end, there was no visible pattern in the differences in autopsies. Natalie Walker, Janet Rice, and Stan Jameson had all been surprised with being hit over the head, assumedly at their abductions, while Kenneth Rigby and Ollie Alexander had both been drugged. The knife wounds were different, but in comparison of the pictures, Scully said, it was clear they had been made by the same weapon. A curved blade of sorts.

Mulder's phone rang and he went outside to take the call. It was information he'd called out for, informing him that the official Fountain of Youth was located in St. Augustine, Florida. Mulder hung up in disgust.

When he got back into the room, Scully was on the phone with her mom. Her fingers were clenched anxiously around the receiver, but she seemed to be happy to be talking to her, even laughing a few times. Mulder sat at the little table, eating a slice of pizza and trying not to stare at her, looking for signs of bad news. When she hung up the phone, her eyes slid closed for a minute in relief.

“How's your mom?” he asked.

“She's good,” Scully said with a sigh. “She's recovering. She says that Tara and Matthew flew up, and that Tara is absolutely spoiling her.” She smiled fondly.

“I'm glad,” he said. Scully nodded absently, her eyes drifting to the floor. He nodded awkwardly towards the piles of paper on the bed. “Want to get back to it?”

“No, Mulder…” she said, yawning right on cue. “I'm beat. I need to get some sleep.”

“You should,” he said quickly. He could tell she was exhausted, and based on everything that he was hiding from her, the least he could do was not push her too hard. “You deserve it.”

She raised her eyebrows at him, like she'd expected him to argue. “Okay,” she said, hands out as if to express her dumbfoundedness. “Sure. You want the first shower?”

“No, you go ahead,” he said. “I'll clear up all this stuff.” He waved a hand at his bed.

Scully nodded again, watching him carefully, leaned over her suitcase and gathered up some things before going into the bathroom. As soon as she was gone, Mulder turned to the bed and gathered up the files, moving them to the table in a hurry. The water turned on in the other room as he flopped across the bed, pulled out his growing Fountain information and flipped to the papers he'd pilfered from the Apalachicola National Forest file.

There hadn't been much closure to that case, just the animal-human thing Scully had shot (which had disappeared anyways) and the victims being rescued. They'd roped off that underground network that they'd found the body in, last Mulder had heard; they hadn't blocked it off, but hadn't explored it either out of fear of the creatures…

He wondered. He wondered if the networks had led somewhere. Maybe to whatever had been keeping those things alive all these years.

There seemed to be only one solution. He had to go into those woods again and find the place where Scully had fallen down a hole, and he likely couldn't go alone. If those things were still out there, he'd have no chance by himself; it had been dangerous enough with the two of them. And he probably would not be able to convince Scully to go. Not in the middle of a case like this.

Mulder rolled over on his back, letting the papers sift to the comforter beside him. He knew that the Fountain of Youth, if it existed, had been around for four hundred years and would hopefully be there for four hundred more. He knew that he could, and likely should, wait until after the case was done with. But he couldn't let it go. Couldn't move past it. It was the same nagging feeling he’d experienced a thousand times: he wanted to know. He wanted to know, and he didn't want to wait. He wanted to tell Scully that he'd stay with her forever, if she'd have him.

The door to the bathroom creaked open just then, and Scully exited with a towel wrapped around her hair. Startled, Mulder flipped over, trapping the papers under his belly. They crinkled beneath him, probably wrinkling like crazy; he winced. “Mulder?” Scully raised an eyebrow as she looked at him. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, fine,” he said, fumbling to gather the papers up in his hands. “My turn.” He bundled the papers together, sliding them back in the folder and dumping them on the table. He passed her as she was rubbing the water out of her hair, and she gave him a bemused look. He smirked at her as he closed the door behind him.

It wasn't until he was in the shower, washing his hair with the little motel shampoos because Scully had looked at him like she wanted to murder him when he'd ran out of shampoo in Arcadia and used hers on a whim (even if he'd enjoyed smelling like her all day), that he realized what he needed to do. He needed to tell Scully what was going on. He was quite possibly a terrible person for not telling her sooner. He needed to see what she thought. And if she liked the idea, if she seemed receptive to it, he'd tell her what he'd found. Suggest that they take a day trip to see if they could find the Fountain and try it out. Just a day trip, really quick, and once he got back, he'd be able to focus on the case. Write a profile, convince Kersh to let him on the task force. Catch a killer and go home safe and sound. It was a perfect plan, he thought as he blinked shampoo out of his eyes. The best he had at the moment. He should've told Scully from the beginning, before they ever came to Tallahassee.

Impulsively, his plan was to tell her as soon as he got out of the shower, but by the time he'd padded out in bare feet and a t-shirt and boxers, Scully was asleep. Sprawled across the bed, legs tangled in the sheets and wet hair curling around her face. He leaned over her, whispered, “Scully,” with every intention of waking her briefly to get her covered up and letting her go back to sleep, but she just muttered something impatiently and turned on her side, flinging her hand out and accidentally smacking him in the face. She never even opened her eyes.

He smiled affectionately, untangled the covers from around her legs before covering her up. He thought of all the long days spent by her hospital bed after her shooting, their fingers locked over the mattress in a thumb war, watching her sleep and thinking, _I almost lost her, goddamnit, it was so close, and I will not leave her alone here._  He brushed some hair back from her face before turning away. He turned off the lights, crawled into bed and started to flick on the TV before remembering that she hated it. So many nights spent in the same room, the same bed, and he'd never even kissed her. He remembered Kroner, her cold feet against his legs and her nose brushing his shoulder through his t-shirt.

“Night, Scully,” he whispered, and turned over, eyes slipping closed. He was more tired than he expected.

He didn't see the flickering movement through the gap in the curtains, the shadow shifting partway across the floor. The face that pressed to the window, the eyes squinting accordingly. Watching.

\---

**_october, 1999_ **

Scully drove straight to the office to meet Kravert, white-knuckling the wheel the entire way there.

He was at his desk when she got to the Bureau, scribbling maniacally at a piece of paper. He had a stack of notes in an absurdly neat script that made her absurdly nostalgic for Mulder's messy scrawl. “Who the hell is this Fellig guy, Scully?” he asked when he saw her, scratching at his forehead with the eraser of his pencil. “Some vampire?”

He'd laughed a little when she told him about the X-Files the first time, and now he seemed to expect her to be some sort of a Ghostbuster or something. She carried Mulder's reputation with her like a weight on her shoulders. She was the only person who would. She didn't notice, most of the time.

“No,” Scully said carefully to Kravert. “Although Mulder's theory  _was_ immortality.”

“That would make sense, since these aliases you wanted me to check out are as far back as the mid-1800’s.”

Scully sat delicately, considering whether or not to grab the papers and run. If Kravert wasn't going to cooperate, she needed on investigate on her own. “I thought you said there were connections with every victim to one of Fellig’s aliases,” she prodded.

“There are. And this is the best lead we've had. It's just… unbelievable, this guy. I don't know if anyone is going to believe us,” said Kravert, rubbing his hairline with the pencil.

“Well, I'm very used to that,” Scully replied tightly. “But as long as there's any connection, we should look into it, right?”

Kravert gave her a wary glance before pushing the notes across the table to her. “Take a look,” he said.

Scully leaned over the papers, sliding her finger down past the familiar stuff, the intel he'd gotten on Ritter and Mulder and herself. “I got a hold of the casefile from last January,” said Kravert. “The deaths in New York, what happened with you and Ritter and Fellig.”

Ritter was at the top with her. _Ritter—Mortally wounded Fellig, as well as injured Agent Scully in a confrontation at Fellig’s apartment. Agent Mulder—..._

“Mulder never met Fellig,” Scully supplied, staring at the empty space beside his name. “But he did some research for me. He found all these aliases.”

“Ahh,” Kravert muttered, scribbling it down beside Mulder's name.

Scully moved her finger past her own name down to the unfamiliar stuff.  _Detective Natalie Walker—Fellig’s contact in the NYPD, collected crime scene photos from him. Interviewed by Agents Ritter and Scully in January of 1999 concerning Fellig’s character. Described Fellig as “creepy, a little suspicious, but doesn't strike me as a murderer.” Was called out to the crime scene at Fellig’s apartment._

Scully nodded absently, moving down the list.  _Kenneth Rigby—Former officer of the NYPD. Fellig’s contact previous to Natalie Walker. Interviewed by Ritter in January of 1999. Said he hadn't had any contact with Fellig since he retired, but Fellig sent him a card after he had a heart attack._ “I'm guessing Fellig sent Rigby a card because he wanted to know his condition,” she said to Kravert. “He had an obsession with death, catching up with Death. Er... death in the personified sense, I mean. We were pursuing him as a first responder to crime scenes because he wanted to take a picture of Death. If he thought Kenneth Rigby was dying, he probably wanted to take his picture."

“Hmm.” Kravert chewed on the edge of the pencil, watching her carefully.

Scully read on.  _Ollie Alexander—was roommates with Henry Strand from 1939 to 1941. Stan Jameson—great-great-great grandson of L.H. Rice’s sister-in-law, Margaret Gardiner. (Wife listed as Winifred Gardiner Rice, died in 1896.) SJ grew up with cousins on his father's side (related distantly to Rice through the mother's line), parents died in an accident when he was a child._  “So Stan Jameson was a distant relative,” she said out.

“Yeah,” Kravert said. “Semi-direct connection. But check out that last one.” He jabbed the pencil at the bottom of the list.

_Janet Rice—the great-great granddaughter of L.H. Rice. Descended from the only son of Winifred Gardiner Rice._  “So the second and third victims were descendants of L.H. Rice,” Scully said quietly. “Fellig’s original alias.” She'd never thought of Fellig as a father; he'd never mentioned having a son. But then again, he didn't come off as a cuddly, paternal type.

“And all of the following victims had a connection to another one of Fellig’s aliases,” Kravert filled in. “Some more meaningful than others, but it seems like your guy tried to keep to himself more and more as the years went by. If the killers were looking for people that Fellig cared about, they would’ve really been scraping the bottom of the barrel by the time they targeted Walker and Rigby. But it seems like they were the people who the Fellig identity had the most contact with.”

“And nothing on the first victim? Virginia Barclay?” Scully asked.

“Nothing  _yet_. I'm looking, but outside of her move to Tallahassee in February of 1999, there's no records on her. No birth records, no previous residences, no hospital records, nothing. She had a small apartment and a job at Walgreens, but avoided socializing with people. She didn't show up at work for three days before she was found dead. Her coworker identified her body.”

“Maybe she was in witness protection,” Scully offered. “Or hiding from… someone. And whoever was looking for her actually found her and murdered her. That would explain why her body went missing. And the other murders could have been committed by a copycat who wanted to hide behind Virginia Barclay."

“That's a good theory. Unfortunately, I think if she was a witness, then whoever had put her into protection would have come forward when she turned up dead.” 

“She could've been hiding from something on her own,” she pointed out. “People don't just appear, Agent Kravert.”

“That's true.” He shuffled the notes, stacking them up. “For now, I say we lean on the Fellig connection. You said that he was trying to catch up with death? What the hell does that mean?”

Scully sighed heavily. She missed Mulder. She wouldn't have to explain this stuff to him; he found it all on his own. He was supposed to be the one who came up with the insane theories, not the other way around. “Alfred Fellig was supposedly immortal,” she said, rubbing at her temples. “When I met him, he wanted to die, but found himself unable to. Ritter and I noted stab wounds on his back from where he'd witnessed a murder and been attacked by the murderer. The wounds and the amount of blood left at the crime scene would suggest that Fellig at least would’ve required a trip to the hospital, if he was normal, but he was perfectly fine.”

Kravert tugged at his tie, watching her carefully. “So the guy couldn't die?”

“That was Mulder's theory,” said Scully. “He told me that he knew when people were going to die. And that he was trying to find Death himself, so he could finally die.” She swallowed uncomfortably, remembering the way he'd looked at her when he thought she was about to die. She hadn't believed, at the time, that he was immortal or that he took her place in death. But that night in the Apalachicola National Forest had made her believe.

Kravert nodded again, looking as if he was deep in thought. “I read Mulder's notes,” he said finally. “The ones included in the digital copy of your X-File. That Louis Brady alias… he suffocated two people? Escaped from prison?”

“Yes,” Scully said, clearing her throat and looking towards the floor. Mulder had told her about that part of the story when he was in the hospital, sitting on the edge of the bed and holding her hand.

“How do we know that's not what's happening this time?”

Scully looked up at Kravert in surprise. “Agent Kravert, Alfred Fellig is dead,” she said incredulously.

“Can we be  _sure_ that Fellig is dead?” Kravert asked.

She blinked in surprise. Maybe this guy was more like Mulder than she thought. (The idea felt like a betrayal of her partner, thunked hard in her stomach until it hurt a little, but it was there.) “You'll remember, Agent Kravert, that I was  _there_. I watched him die, and I myself was wounded in the process,” she said, somewhat coldly. “I'm absolutely positive that Alfred Fellig is dead.”

Kravert squirmed a little. “Yeah, but if the man was really immortal…”

“Nobody lives forever, Agent Kravert,” Scully snapped. “Not even those who live for an abnormally long amount of time. Fellig is dead. And even if he wasn't for some inexplicable reason, you'll remember that I  _saw_ the murderers. They abducted myself and my partner and tried to kill us both. I can assure you that none of them were Alfred Fellig.”

(Every word felt like a betrayal to Mulder, denying the existence of immortality, but it couldn't be Fellig. It couldn't. She'd watched him die.)

(But then again, she'd watched Mulder die, too, receive fatal wounds that should have killed him. So how could she keep telling herself that he was alive?)

Kravert was looking away now, towards his lap. “Just trying to consider all the possibilities, Agent Scully,” he said awkwardly.

Scully folded her hands on the desk. “Fellig is the key,” she said calmly. “I agree with that. We just have to find out what the connection is. Who is killing people connected to Fellig. Why Ritter and I were the only ones left alive, and why Virginia Barclay and Mulder were the only ones who… whose bodies were stolen.” She swallowed hard, tried to remind herself that Mulder might be alive, that she was mostly referring to him as dead as a formality to those who wouldn't possibly believe he might be alive if they knew what she knew. But she didn't know what she believed about Mulder anymore. She didn't know.

“All right,” Kravert said quietly. “So where would you start, Agent Scully?”

Her eyes landed on the list of Fellig’s aliases again. Louis Brady. And then she remembered the gap that Mulder had found in Fellig’s history. He'd been arrested for murder as Louis Brady in 1929, disappeared after a year in prison, and then reappeared in 1939 as Henry Strand. What the hell happened to Fellig in those missing years? Where did he go, what did he do?

“We need to start by figuring out why here,” she said. “Why Tallahassee, of all places? Is the murderer native to Tallahassee? Is it because it's the origin of Virginia Barclay? Did Fellig ever appear in Tallahassee at some point during his extraordinarily long life?” She scooped the list of aliases off of the table. “You have these memorized?” she asked, and he nodded. “Look further into Virginia Barclay, see what you can find,” she said.

“And what will you be doing?” he asked.

She tucked the list in her suit jacket pocket. “I'm going to see if I can find any traces of Fellig here,” she said.

\---

Scully ended up at the State Library and Archives of Florida, looking through photos for signs of Fellig. It was a long shot, a very long shot, but the best chance she had; she knew that Fellig would be off the radar if he'd come to Tallahassee after going on the run, which would make him near impossible to find. She wished, not for the first time, that Mulder was here; she didn't know how he'd managed to find Fellig’s aliases, but it'd be helpful if he could work his magic on this.

She flipped through a collection of photos—photos narrowed down as best as possible to Tallahassee in the 1930’s—for hours, until her eyes were bleary and her stomach was growling insistently. She might have forgotten lunch, she realized, as the corner of a picture sliced against her thumb. She swore, shaking her hand in the air. She looked at the photo briefly, ready to shove it aside, ready to give up and go home. For fuck’s sake, this picture was only of a group of men unloading what looked like fish at a grocery store. She was more than ready to give up, and then she saw it.

It had been a while, but she'd never forget that face, his voice telling her that she needed to close her eyes. It was Fellig’s face. Turned halfway toward the camera as he lifted a bucket of fish onto the back of a truck. Scully's breath caught in her throat. She reached for the photo, drawing it closer to her so she could read the caption.  _Barclay Fish unloads their products._

Barclay. Like Virginia Barclay.

She'd found her connection.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My depiction of the mothmen things from Detour largely comes from the episode itself, knowledge gained from books and TV, and anything I’ve taken from eleventh grade biology. Any inaccuracies are because of this.
> 
> The State Library and Archives of Florida is a real place, but one that I’ve never actually been to; any inaccuracies are because of this. The photo collection that appears in the chapter is also real, but all other details are ones I’ve made up.


	5. Chapter 5

**chapter five  
**

**_may, 1999_ **

Mulder woke up to the sounds of Scully shuffling around the room, papers rustling as she gathered them up. “Scully?” he mumbled, turning over in bed. “What's going on?”

“I have to go to work,” she said, tucking files into her briefcase. “I have to present my autopsy findings to the task force in an hour.”

He twisted until he was sitting up and rubbed his eyes blearily. “I could go with you,” he offered.

Scully was already shaking her head. “You can't be here, remember?” she said. “And we didn't come up with anything concrete enough to use as your excuse.”

Oh. Right. They hadn't. This case seemed to be full of dead ends, a lack of traps to lay. Mulder got out of bed, scrubbing his hands sleepily through his hair. “Maybe you'll think of something else after today,” he offered, walking towards the bathroom.

“Maybe. The best idea so far is to set up surveillance at the park where they're dumped—that guy Kravert’s idea, he told me when he called for the autopsy results. But he told me no one is going for that because it requires waiting for there to be another victim.”

“That might be the only way to avoid having more victims after that,” Mulder said, closing the door behind him.

He was in the middle of splashing water on his face when he remembered his own idea the night before. He needed to clear the air with Scully concerning this crazed search for immortality in a thousands of years old legend. He got the feeling that she wouldn't be very receptive this early in the morning or in the midst of a case like this, but the least he could do was let her know where he was. They were partners. He was doing this for her. She needed to know. He rubbed a hand over his face to get rid of the stray water droplets and stumbled out of the bathroom. “Scully…” he started, but he stopped when he saw what she was doing.

She was holding his ongoing Fountain file in her hand, her face unreadable. (Although judging by the stiffness in her shoulders, he guessed that she was not happy.) “Mulder,” she said, and her teeth were clenched but she spoke carefully. “What the hell is this?”

Shit. His mouth went dry at the sight of her standing there, on the verge of fury with his latest quest in her hand. This wasn't how he wanted to tell her. “This wasn't how I wanted to tell you,” he said.

“Tell me what?” she snapped. “That you tagged along on this case, under the guise of helping me, so you could investigate an X-File?”

His defenses came up quickly, more quickly than he intended. “It's not like that,” he snapped right back. “I have been trying to help you, but it's a little fucking hard when I'm not actually on the case. Also possibly because I have been on the damn case for approximately a day.”

“You're not on the case because you're irresponsible, Mulder!” she snapped, and he recoiled as if slapped. “You are so hyperfocused on the things you deem important that nothing else fucking matters! I saw it on our previous assignment under Kersh, repeatedly, even after I had to run after you and save your ass on several occasions. Even after both of us almost losing our jobs multiple times, nothing has fucking changed! Your X-Files take precedence over everything else!”

“I thought they were ours,” he said quietly.

“I can never quite tell, Mulder,” she hissed. “Half the time, I can't even tell if you want me around. Since I make things personal.”

His jaw locked up. It had been months since that entire ugly argument; he'd tried to apologize, several times since it became apparent that he'd been tricked, that Diana wasn't on his side, but she hadn't wanted to hear it.

He never should have said that. He made things more personal than anyone from day one, spilling his life story to Scully when he barely knew her. For fuck’s sake, he was the one who was in love with her, who was looking for this stupid Fountain for her. It had always been personal with them. Always.

“You have been selfish these past few months,” Scully said, and she spoke with the calm level-headedness that he associated with her, but her voice was thick with anger. “Maybe for our entire partnership, and I've just been too blind to see it. But I really thought you were going to try to snap out of it, maybe see that you were treating me like a sidekick again, maybe pull yourself together and stop. And here we are, on a case that you inserted yourself in even though it risks out jobs to do so—not because you want to help me, like you originally said, but because of a fucking X-File.” She shook the folder at him; a picture of the predator’s cave from two years ago slid out and onto the floor. “The Fountain of Youth, Mulder?” she asked tightly. “Really? We've investigated some ridiculous stuff before, but always within  _reason_. When people were hurt or dead.” Jaw clenched, she set the file back on the table calmly.

Mulder thought about telling her  _why_ he was looking, but the words wouldn't jar loose. They were grounded so far within him that he didn't know if he could ever speak them again. Instead, he said stiffly, “It's not like that.”

“Then what is it like, Mulder?” She was turned away from him, closing her briefcase and picking it up; she wouldn't look at him. “Explain it to me, please. Explain to me why this fucking waste of time can't wait until after this incredibly important case where people are dying.”

“You didn't want me on the case in the first place!” Mulder snapped.

“You insisted on coming along! That's what I don't get, Mulder, why you would insist on coming along only to investigate something else instead, when you could've limited your involvement and looked for this goddamn water fountain on your own.”

Her shoulders were rigid in fury, and she still wasn't looking at him. That wasn't fair; he hadn't wanted her to be alone on the case long before he'd decided to look for some method of immortality. It had just seemed convenient at the time, that helping Scully and searching for the Fountain were all in the same place. “That's not fair,” he said. “I was looking into this case before you even got sent out to Tallahassee. Before I started looking into the Fountain. I wanted to help you. I just…”

“Just what, Mulder?” She turned towards him then, and she looked hurt. “The fact is that even if you wanted to help at the beginning, you still blew it by lying to me two days ago when I called to tell you I got this assignment. You prioritized the X-Files over me and over my job once again. And I can't deal with it anymore, Mulder.”

Guilt rose in his throat like bile. He should've told her what he was planning. He should've waited until the case was over to even look into it. He'd fucked up, and even though he was doing this for her, he had no idea how to apologize. Look at the history of their partnership, and he had entirely too many things to apologize for. Too many things that had happened because of him that could never be taken back. “Scully…” he said quietly.

She pushed past him, looking down at the ground. He turned and watched her walk to the door. “I'd like you out of my motel room by this evening,” she said, facing the door. “I don't care where you go, or what you do, but I don't want you here.” She opened the door, stepped out before he could say anything, and let it slam behind her.

Mulder sunk down on his unmade bed in defeat, covering his hands with his face.

\---

He didn't know what to do after the fight, whether he should stay in Tallahassee and try to apologize, or head back to DC and wait for her return. In the end, he didn't want to just sit back and do nothing. In the end, there was too much bouncing around in his head to just walk away. In the end, the questions he had about the Fountain just wouldn't leave him alone.

He drove to the forest because he didn't know what else to do. He could ask Scully later, when things were different between them, what she wanted to do (although at this point, he doubted she'd want to spend eternity with him). He just wanted to know if it was out there. That it was an option, that Scully had a way out of being alone if she wanted it. It didn't even have to be him that became immortal; just as long as she had someone. As long as she wasn't alone.

He wanted to know if it was real, so he went. He wrote an apology note for Scully and left it in the motel room, and he packed up the rental car and drove out of Tallahassee, down Route 43 towards the forest. He drove until he found the tree stump where he'd pointed out Ponce De Leon to Whatshisname, where he parked and got out of the car. The forest loomed before him, over nine hundred miles of trees. How could he find just one thing in there?

He'd never intended to go looking alone; he'd always figured he could convince Scully to go with him, one way or another. He had thought about calling Michele Fazekas as he left Tallahassee, but considering that she hadn't been too gung-ho about the predators  _before_ she ended up hanging unconscious in a cave, he didn't think she'd be into it. It was probably unwise to go into the woods on his own, but he didn't know how else to find what he was looking for. His plan at the moment was to find the network of underground tunnels that he and Scully had found the victims in two years ago.

He had a backpack full of water bottles and granola bars, a tent folded up and stuffed inside. He locked his car and walked out into the woods.

\---

Twenty minutes in and Mulder was already horribly lost. He'd always gone into the woods with a guide of sorts; what the hell did he know about hiking? He was on edge at every sound, every snapping twig or rustling leaf, looking for pairs of glowing red eyes out among the trees. He was thinking about the mothmen, the one that had survived and the one who had apparently disappeared from Dr. Decker’s office, how little chance he'd have if they decided to come after him without Scully running in to save him. His hand shot to his holster every time he was startled. He'd packed several extra clips in case he ran out the way they nearly had the last time.

He missed Scully. It was absurd that he did, after the fight they'd had, but he did nevertheless. It got to the point where it was impossible to solve cases without her, to work the way he had between Diana’s departure and Scully's arrival. It was ridiculous to him, walking through the woods in the blistering heat and humidity without Scully beside him. In the thick silence of the woods, his mind wandered, to the case, to the victims, to the past few tension-filled months. To Scully, to Scully half-dead after her encounter with Padgett, to Scully pale in her bed after her shooting. Back to Fellig, back to immortality. Full circle.

The sun sunk low in the sky as morning fell into afternoon. He drank half of a water bottle and dumped the other half over his head.

In the late afternoon, he found a river. The ground sunk low into a river bank, with stick-straight trees on the edge of the water. Mulder sat on the ground, back against a tree, groaning with relief as he put the bag down. He leaned back against the bark of the tree, closing his eyes and seriously, seriously considering the decisions to run amok in the endless woods looking for something that might not exist.

“Tired?” asked a voice that Mulder didn't recognize.

He opened his eyes and saw a trio of men standing on the bank of the river. One, an older-looking man, was standing closer to him; two younger men were behind him, fishing poles in hand.

Mulder laughed a little, wiping sweat out of his eyes. “Yeah,” he said. “Guess I'm not cut out for this.”

“I don't know many that are,” said the man.

On a whim, Mulder got to his feet and held out his hand, introducing himself as, “Fox Mulder.” He thought that maybe if he could make some sort of small connection with these men, he could ask them about the Fountain. And maybe they would know something, be able to send him in the right direction.

The man smiled easily, taking his hand. “Peter Barclay,” he said. “And these are my sons, Samuel and Andrew.” Mulder nodded at the men behind him as he shook Peter Barclay’s hand. “So what brings you to this neck of the forest?” Barclay asked. “Not a very big tourist spot.”

Mulder put on his disheveled-tourist act, shrugging a little as he chuckled. “You're going to think I'm crazy,” he said.

One of the sons—Andrew, Mulder thought—spoke up. “You're looking for the Fountain of Youth, aren't you?”

Mulder tried to grin sheepishly, hoping his acting skills had gotten better. (Scully had critiqued his house husband act in Arcadia. “You're overdoing it,” she'd said. “Nobody is  _that_ happy to be confined to suburbia.”) “According to the legend,” he said.

“What's your interest?” asked the other brother, Samuel, in an almost bored tone.

Mulder shrugged again. “I have an interest in urban legends, the like,” he said. “Thought I'd check it out, see if it was real.”

“The story of Ponce De Leon and his immortality fountain,” said Peter, speaking wistfully. “I always thought if it was real that it wouldn't be made of water.”

Mulder raised his eyebrows in interest. “Do you know anything about it?”

“Legend has it that it'll keep you young and keep you from dying,” said Andrew. “Heal any wound. It's believed that one has to visit the Fountain again and again if they want to keep this eternal youth, however. A temporary elixir.”

“Hmm,” Mulder said, one hand in his pocket. He looked between the three of them curiously. “And would you happen to know where this temporary elixir is said to be?”

Samuel guffawed, wiping his mouth as he grinned with the humor of it all. “We would not,” he said, laughter still in his voice. “Seeing as how it doesn't exist.”

\---

**_october, 1999_ **

Scully found the records of the Barclay Fish company. An obscure family-owned fishing company that began in the twenties and fading out quietly in the forties with the beginning of the war. A search through records in the thirties and she found the location of the company: based in the Apalachicola National Forest, it said. The forest where they'd hid from Mothmen and she'd sang to him in a toneless deadpan. The forest where they had been abducted and nearly killed. The forest that she hoped she'd find him alive in.

The abandoned company was reportedly located near Wolf Trap Bay. She had an employee at the Archives who apparently hiked through the woods a lot write her directions. She didn't want to wait another minute; she wanted answers, immediately.

The moment where she fucked up was when she went back to the Bureau to tell Kravert. She didn't see it coming. He was excited, at first. He kept saying, “You found the connection, I can't fucking believe you found the connection!” He jabbed a finger at the picture with excitement; Scully had successfully used her badge to confiscate it. “So this is Fellig?” he asked for the third time, poking at his face in the blur of black and white.

“Yes,” said Scully evenly. “I'm absolutely certain.” She'd checked the picture again and again to make sure, and she was sure: definitely, absolutely Fellig.

“And this is the Barclay family,” said Kravert. “As in, Virginia Barclay.”

“Yes,” Scully said. "It would seem that way, as there's really no other explanation for Virginia being targeted. I believe that she was targeted for her family's connection to Fellig, as were the rest of the victims. The reasoning behind it all is still uncertain, but it seems like the most sound explanation to me.”

“But there's no record of this family since the forties,” Kravert said.

“There's no record of the  _business_ since the forties,” Scully said. “The family… I'm not entirely sure. The woman I talked to offered to comb through the censuses for me, but…”

“There's a notable lack of history on Virginia Barclay,” Kravert interrupted, his voice thoughtful. “I wonder if this is a family who really likes to avoid the census, any records at all. Which beggars the question: how did this Fellig guy find them in the thirties? And why did Virginia Barclay come out into the open?”

“And who killed her,” Scully said softly.

“I think now that we have a definite connection, we should look into Fellig and see if there's anyone who'd want to… kill people he had a connection to.” Kravert sighed, rubbing at the back of his neck. “Which could take a while, considering his aliases…”

“I have the location of the former Barclay Fish company,” Scully said, pulling the folded piece of paper with the directions on it out of her pocket. “I thought maybe we should check it out.”

Kravert took the piece of paper, and his forehead wrinkled as soon as he saw it. “Wolf Trap Bay? Out in the Apalachicola Forest? That place is a maze, Scully. Why would we wanna check out a fishing company that's over fifty years old? Virginia Barclay never even would've been around it when she was alive.”

“It could be a lead,” she said firmly. “Since Mulder and I were taken to that forest.”

Understanding flickered across Kravert’s face as it softened. “Oh, Scully,” he said softly. “I don't think looking for the Barclays will help you find Mulder.”

“There is a connection.” Scully kept her face neutral and hard. She wouldn't break down in front of him, this guy she still barely knew, no matter how soft his voice got. “If the remaining Barclays are in the forests, they could give us insight into their family's interactions with Fellig… they-they could explain why Virginia came on the radar…”

“Scully, unless they're living in the old fish company, I doubt we can find them in nine hundred miles of woods,” Kravert said sympathetically. “And I'm sorry, but the same goes for Mulder. They looked for him in the area where you were found, but they couldn't possibly search the entire forest in the way that they needed to…”

“The Barclays could be in the general area,” Scully said insistently. “They could be another connection. Do you really think it was a coincidence, that the Barclays had a business based in the same forest where Mulder and I were attacked?”

“Yes,” Kravert said, but Scully wasn't listening. She plunged on: “F-for all we know, they could've taken all their victims there… they could've killed them there and dropped them in the park. And maybe if they didn't kill Mulder then they still have him out there… for all we know, Virginia Barclay could've been killed by her own family.”

(She'd been thinking about it, and she saw some familiarity in the men in the picture besides Fellig, whose faces she could actually see; two of them were turned towards the truck, backs to the camera, but one was turned towards the camera, just slightly. His beard obscured most of his face, but Scully felt like she recognized him, somehow. She felt like the Barclays were the answer. She couldn't explain it but she did.)

“Dana,” Kravert said, interrupting her, and it startled her. He had never called her that. She had an absurd urge to tell him to call her Scully, but she couldn't do that, either, because the truth was that every time someone called her Scully, she heard his voice, or the absence of his voice. Sometimes she thought that she'd almost forgotten it, and that terrified her. She hated this, hated being here with Kravert instead of Mulder, hated that she had to look for Mulder, that someone had killed or him taken him away from her and this random guy would not help her find him. She hated all of this.

“Dana, you're reaching,” Kravert said, and she remembered when Mulder had told her that she was reaching about Diana, and that filled her with an uncontrollable rage. “I want to figure this out too, but we can't follow leads that don't exist.”

Scully took the directions from his hand coldly. “ _You_ are ignoring this lead,” she snapped. “There is something here.” She put the directions back in her pocket and turned on her heel.

“Scully,” Kravert protested as she walked out of the Bureau. She didn't turn back. 

She went back to the motel after picking up a Cobb salad at the store. She was starving. She ate it on the bed of her room and ignored the tears burning at the back of her eyes.

She would just go herself, but she couldn't go into the woods alone. She knew she couldn't. It was irresponsible, and she and Mulder had barely survived the last couple times they were there. But if Kravert wasn't going to go with her… who the hell was she going to go with? Skinner? Diana Fowley might have some interest in this case, considering it was Mulder; she'd asked Scully about progress on the case several times, even offered her assistance. But despite her hatred for Diana, despite the fact that she couldn’t be around the woman for more than five minutes without wanting to smack her, Diana likely wouldn't want to work with her after they'd butted heads on some X-File concerning an artifact that had eventually disappeared. And besides that, she wasn't even in Tallahassee; she'd been on some covert assignment since the artifact had disappeared.

The whole thing was absurd: the fact that she needed her partner to help find her partner. She wanted him with her. She missed him like air.

She fell asleep at some point, sprawled out across the bedspread, and right into a dream. It was the same one she'd been having for months, the one from that night in the woods. Except it was different this time: Mulder could speak, for some reason, and he looked her straight in the eye when they put the knife to his throat. “I'm closer than you think,” he said.

_Mulder,_  she tried, but she still couldn't speak. Her mouth was sealed. She moaned his name but he couldn't hear her. She reached for him, even though she couldn't get to him.  _I'm trying, Mulder, just hang on,_  she pleaded soundlessly.  _Just hang on, I’m coming._

“I need your help,” he said, and he sounded scared. “Help me, Scully, please.”

_I'm sorry,_  she tried to say, _Mulder, I'm so sorry,_  but the knife was back. It sunk into his neck. She jolted away in a cold sweat and just barely managed not to scream. It wasn't real. Mulder wasn't here, and he hadn't said anything to her before he died. Or before they took him, because he wasn't dead. He couldn't be dead.

Scully lay her head flat on the mattress, breathing raggedly.  _Mulder, I'm sorry,_  she thought.  _Wherever you are, I'm so, so sorry. I’m going to find you, but I’m so scared I’ll be too late._ She pushed hair out of her eyes and, since she was alone, let the tears come.

\---

In the morning, she knew what she had to do. Fuck waiting for backup; she'd waited long enough. Mulder needed her help, and she wasn't going to wait anymore.

She called Skinner and told him that she was following a lead in the Apalachicola National Forest. She told him that she likely wouldn't have reception, so he wouldn't be able to contact her. And then she turned off her phone. She checked her gun to make sure it was loaded, and checked to make sure she had extra ammo. She checked for her handcuffs. She left, driving out of the motel and down the highway towards the forest.

\---

It took a little over half an hour for her to reach Wolf Trap Bay, and fifteen minutes more to reach the abandoned building. A hand-painted sign, faded and weathered by the rain, hung crookedly on the front of the store. Scully threw her car into Park and turned it off, getting out and tramping through the weeds. The sun was high in the sky, but it didn't beat down as hot on the top of her bright head. Perks of autumn, she supposed.

She tried not to get too excited about the possibilities flitting through her mind. There was no guarantee he'd be in there, she reminded herself. There wasn't even a possibility, really. Just a lead.

She held a large flashlight in the palm of her hand. As she reached the run-down building, she flicked it on and pushed the old creaking door open.

It was dark inside, and Scully heard the scittering of rodent in the background. She winced, the yellow circle of her torch bouncing off of the dusty corners of the room as she stepped inside.

The door scraped closed behind her, like a door in a horror movie.

Scully paced around the empty rooms, the places where they'd prepared the fish, stored the fish. Uneasiness curled in her stomach as she left footprints in the dust, as she turned around the room. If Mulder were here, he would think it was haunted. She smiled wistfully as she turned around, and then she saw it. A wallet, a very familiar-looking wallet, lying on the ground.

She drew closer, kneeling on the ground and scooping it up. It was leather, and it felt familiar as well. She flipped it open, and her breath caught in her throat. It was Mulder's driver's license, Mulder's face staring grimly out at her, likely because he hated the DMV. Mulder's wallet. She reached out with one finger and touched his stiff plastic image. He'd been here.

She stood with the wallet in her hand, and a folded-up photograph fluttered out of one of the pockets, along with a ten-dollar bill. She took another shaky breath, leaned over and scooped up the photo, letting her flashlight tumble to the ground. She was a little stunned when she saw what it was: a photograph of the two of them, a copy of the one he had tacked up in their office. Something where they both looked happier than she'd felt in months.

She held the wallet in one hand and the photo in the other, delicately, like they were precious, wonderful things. A tear dripped down her cheek, but she ignored it, impatiently blinking and looking at the picture. It was them on a case, him pointing at her face and her pointing at the camera. She remembered that it was taken by press for Skinner's friend's stupid movie that she hoped would never be finished. It looked like they were goofing off. She remembered being embarrassed afterward, praying that the photo never got out, but she couldn't remember what they were talking about. How could she have forgotten what they were talking about? She sniffled. They’d gotten the photo in the mail, along with some others, and she’d framed it largely as a joke, but it had just become a natural part of their office. She'd never known that he kept a copy of it for himself. In his wallet.

He was  _here_ , she reminded herself, and turned around the room as if he'd been waiting in a corner. “Mulder!” she called out, because if he was here, then he might still be here. She listened very carefully, but heard no answering voice, no muffled thumps or grunts. She spun around again, looking for closets or trunks or any other signs. Her foot hit the flashlight and it rolled, its beam streaking across the wall like a rogue UFO. She swallowed roughly. “Mulder!” she called again, but there was no answer.

She checked the entire building for him, every nook and cranny. He wasn't in there. He had been, at any point after he left the motel room in Tallahassee, but that didn't mean it had been recently. He could've looked for the goddamn Fountain of Youth here and dropped his wallet. He could be dead, for all she knew. He could be dead.

Scully swallowed back the lump in her throat and walked outside. The door creaked horribly behind her. She tucked Mulder's wallet into her pocket, but she kept the photo in her hand.

She was almost to her car when she heard it; the sound of another car rolling through the trees.

_Mulder,_  she thought involuntarily,and she ran towards the sound. She pushed her way through a copse of trees and moss, coming out on the other side when she saw the car pulling up the driveway in front of the little house, saw that the driver wasn't Mulder. Her breath caught in her throat, and she ducked behind a tree, heart pounding. If the driver was who she thought he was…

The door opened and she heard a deep voice. Her stomach dropped out from under her. It was the man who had stabbed her, who had taken them both captive and laughed while they bled out. She had found him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> picture source: https://how-i-met-your-mulder.tumblr.com/post/152466145438/perplexistan-akiplo-i-spy-the-mysterious


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warning for kidnapping and some violence

**chapter six**

**_may, 1999_ **

He blinked in surprise when Samuel Barclay said that the Fountain didn't exist. He'd been expecting this a little, from someone, but it was a bit of a surprise coming from these people, for some reason. He didn't know why, but it was. “What, you don't believe?” he asked, shrugging it off.

“I don't believe. My brother has the good sense not to believe,” Samuel said, turning half-towards the river. He seemed almost bored. “As for my father, he gives it the benefit of the doubt.”

Peter shrugged, running a hand over his silvery head. “I suppose I have something of a romantic in me.”

“So you've never come across anything that looks a little suspicious?” Mulder asked. “Anything to make you believe?”

Andrew laughed, as if Mulder was an amusing child. “I've come across several tourists looking for exactly what you were,” he said. “And I've all told them the same thing: you're probably looking for St. Augustine.”

Mulder laughed too, a little irritably, said, “Well, I suppose if you can't help me, I should probably be on my way.” He bent over and hoisted the heavy backpack off of the ground. His shoulders groaned in protest, but he ignored them.

“Well, good luck with your fruitless pursuit, Mr. Mueller,” Andrew said, eyes towards the river like his brother.

“It's Mulder, actually,” Mulder said shortly.

“Good luck, Mr. Mulder,” Peter said, deadly serious. “Sometimes you find things where you least expect them.”

He reached out to shake Mulder's hand, and Mulder accepted, watching the man carefully. He couldn't read Peter’s expression. “Thank you,” he said, and turned to leave.

Something else occurred to him after he took a few steps. Barclay. Virginia Barclay, who had no records.

There had to be more than one set of Barclays in the Tallahassee area, but it was worth a try. He turned around and said, “Hey, do you guys have a relative named Virginia? Virginia Barclay?”

Andrew raised his eyebrows in surprise, like he couldn't believe Mulder was asking. Samuel snorted, turning back to the river. “I'm afraid not,” Peter said. “Do you know a Virginia Barclay?”

Mulder shrugged. Reading over her file didn't seem like a synonym for knowing her. “Once,” he said. He wiped his dirty hands on his jeans and added, “Good talking to you gentlemen.” And then he turned and left.

\---

He walked as the sun sunk low in the sky, as blue-black touched the edges of the horizon. The ache in his back from the weight started to become routine. The boredom almost became a bit routine. He considered turning back around and going the way he came, but the truth was that he had no idea where he'd come from. What was it Michele had used to mark their path through the forest last time? Pebbles or something. Like Hansel and Gretel. He should've remembered that before coming in here. Or maybe he should've waited and talked to Scully, explained what was going on after she'd cooled down a bit and waited to see if she wanted to come with him. Definitely shouldn't have tramped into the woods by himself. It wasn't dark, not yet, but as the day gave way to dusk, the jumpiness came back. He couldn't fall asleep. He wouldn't fall asleep. If he did and the mothmen came, he really would be helpless. He tonelessly whistled  _Joy to the World_ to break the silence.

It happened all of a sudden: he was walking, and then he was falling. The ground gave way beneath him and he plunged into darkness. He let out a pained grunt as he picked himself up off the dirt. What was it Scully had said a couple of years ago? Soft dirt, kind of? It was not soft at all. He groaned, picking himself up off the ground and shifting on the hard dirt. The backpack scraped against his spine. He sat back on his haunches and looked around. He was in some dirt cavern, dark and dank. It seemed to be a tunnel, an underground tunnel.

He'd found it. The caverns he and Scully had fallen into. Maybe it wasn't the same one, but a similar one. And definitely worth checking out, seeing as how he'd fallen at least seven feet and, looking above him, he could see no easy way out.

Smiling a little to himself, Mulder stood on stiff legs and unzipped his backpack, took out a flashlight and one of his water bottles and chugged half of it before tucking it back inside. The least he could do was keep going. He turned on the flashlight and started walking.

There were bones in the tunnel. He wasn't surprised, considering what he'd seen of the mothmen a couple of years ago, but it still came as a bit of a fear-inducer. He was relieved to notice that none of the remains looked very recent, but it still spooked him. If the mothmen were still there…

He fumbled anxiously for his gun and held it in his free hand as he walked through the tunnel. Not for the first time, he wished Scully was there.

After at least another hour of walking in the dark, occasionally under holes to the above that were way too high to reach, Mulder got to the end of the tunnel. It was styled like some sort of rotunda, with other tunnels spiraling out like a pinwheel. And at the center was a tree.

Somewhere between a sapling and a full-grown, it was set up in the middle of the rotunda, directly underneath a circle that let in sunlight. It was about as high as Mulder, a thick and round trunk. It looked young, near new, but he noticed a carving that looked older in the bark. At least as old as the _Ad Noctum_  post they'd found in the tunnels two years ago.

Mulder drew closer, shedding the backpack on the ground, and the words became more visible to him:  _Fuente de la juventud_. His high school Spanish was a tad rusty, but he guessed that meant Fountain of Youth. He reached out and touched the carvings: they were deep, engraved into the wood. Definitely old.

 _I always thought if it was real that it wouldn't be made of water,_  Peter Barclay had said of the Fountain.

Was this is? Had he known? Was this sad little tree what Mulder had been looking for all this time? He traced the letters absently with one finger, looking up and down the tree. It was possible, he thought. This could be the key to Scully never being alone. All he'd need to do was show her where it was, and she could do whatever she wanted.

But what if it didn't work? What if he was wrong? If he was going to offer Scully a solution, then he had to be certain it was one, and it seemed that the only way to do that was to test it.

The deciding factor was what Andrew had said about the Fountain being temporary. If he tried something from this tree, and if it worked, he wouldn't be trapped in immortality forever if Scully didn't want him to be. But he might as well make sure it worked. He could just slice his hand open or something and see if it healed. If it didn't, Scully never had to know his intentions. If it did, well.

Mulder debated for several minutes how, exactly, the Fountain-tree-whatever worked. He considered boring a hole in the tree and drinking the sap, but that seemed too complicated and he didn't have anything to do that with, anyway. He considered the bark for a moment before finally giving up and grabbing a handful of leaves from the trees. He inserted a couple in his mouth and chewed, wincing at the bitter taste. It tasted horrible. “One must really want immortality to eat this shit on a regular basis,” he cracked, in an attempt to lighten his own mood. It didn't work. It was a heavy thing, what he was doing. If this worked, for some indeterminate amount of time, he wouldn't be able to age or die.

And if it didn't? His hand was really gonna fucking hurt.

Mulder chewed every one of the leaves, only retching a couple of times. He hoped to God they weren't poisonous. It would be ironic if he was poisoned by the Fountain of Youth. His joints groaned in relief as he sat down beside his backpack, leaning against the dirt wall behind him. He wiped the sweat off of his forehead and drank the last of a water bottle to rid his mouth of the bitter taste. He leaned his head back, wiped sweat out of his eyes, and rummaged for the pocket knife in his pack. And then his phone rang.

His phone, shoved somewhere deep inside his backpack. “I didn't even know I had a signal,” he said out loud, blinking in surprise. He abandoned the pocket knife pursuit and searched for his phone, whipped it out and managed to press Answer just before it went to voicemail. “Mulder,” he said, shoving the phone into the sweaty space between his cheek and his shoulder.

“Mulder, it's me,” Scully said. She sounded tired and pissy. “I got your note.”

The note. He'd almost forgotten the note. His mouth still bitter from the leaves, he swallowed, said, “Yeah, Scully, I…”

“Obviously there's a lot for us to discuss, but I wanted to call and ask where it is you went.” The tension was audible in her voice, tight and sharp. “I know I kicked you out, and I'm sorry for that, but Mulder, I need to know that you did not run off to that forest and out yourself in danger…”

He caught a glimpse of the Fountain-tree out of the corner of his eye, and couldn't help grinning. He'd found it, he'd actually found it. He didn't know if she'd be happy about it, but he wanted to tell Scully that he found it. “I actually did, Scully, uh,” he said, laughing a little to himself. “I found it. I found the fucking Fountain of Youth. I'm looking at it right now.”

Silence on the other end. “Scully?” Mulder finally ventured gingerly. He probably should have lead with an apology.

“Jesus Christ, Mulder,” she said in a weary exhale. “You went into those woods alone? After we almost died last time? What the  _hell_?”

He rubbed at his forehead. “Scully, I've been careful,” he sighed. “I haven't even seen those things…”

“Why did you ditch me?” she demanded. “Why the hell did you ditch me? Why would you come to Florida and pretend to help me for a stupid case like this?”

“Scully, I didn't ditch you. You kicked me out,” he said, a little irritated now.

“Yes, because I was angry, and I didn't really think you'd leave, and if you did, I thought you'd go  _home_. I didn't think you'd run off to chase the very thing we'd just fought about!”

“You don't understand,” he tried, “if you'd just let me explain…”

“How selfish can you be, Mulder, that you absolutely ignore everything I said this morning? Ignore the important case in favor of this, this stupid, nonexistent legend? Why does it matter so much, Mulder? What do you care?” He grimaced, closing his eyes; he didn't make any effort to answer, his hands leaving sweaty prints on the back of his phone. He didn't know what to say. She just kept going, plowing through him like a freight train. “What the hell is so important about tracking down something that had supposedly been around for thousands of years,  _if_ it even exists? Why do you have to look right this very second? Why can't it wait?"

“It's because of you,” he said softly, on an impulse. He hadn't planned on doing this, not like this, but he needed her to know. To understand. “I'm doing this for you. So you won't have to be alone.”

There was a silence on the other end, one that indicated Scully's surprise. For a minute, he thought maybe she was furious, raging at his presumption. He was about to apologize when she said, “Oh,” in a voice that was soft and almost near tearful. “Oh, Mulder,” she said.

He softened a little, ready to explain further, to apologize as many times as he needed to, when he heard a thunk on the other end, and then a clattering sound.  “Scully?” he called, a little nervous. “Scully, are you there? What happened?” Nothing on the end but a faint moaning sound. What may have been scratching. “Scully!” he shouted, truly frightened now, stumbling to his feet.

He heard Scully's voice, wobbly and faint through the speakers. “Mulder,” she rasped weakly. And then another smacking sound. She went quiet.

“Scully?” He clutched the phone hard in his hand, some part of him chanting frantically, _Not again, not again, not again._  It hadn't even been that long since fucking Padgett. “Scully!” he shouted. Why the hell did he leave her? He never should've left her side, never should've yelled at her, should've apologized right away… “Scully, are there? Can you hear me? Scully, answer me, please…”

The phone clattered as someone picked it up. “Scully?” he asked, eagerly.  _Please please please be okay._

“I'm afraid not,” said a strange woman's voice on the other end.

Fury boiled up inside of him. “What did you do to her?” he snarled, pressing a hand hard against the dirt wall so he wouldn't punch something. “What the fuck did you do?”

“Nothing much yet,” the woman said pleasantly, like they were just making conversation. “Is this Mulder? Special Agent Fox Mulder? Agent Scully's partner?”

“Fuck you,” he hissed, hitting the wall with his hand. Chunks of dirt fell to the floor. “Leave her alone! Let her go right now, or so help me God..."

“I don't think I can,” said the woman. “Very sorry about that. I've been watching the both of you, and I've noted how close you two are. Very close. It's almost intriguing.”

Fury bubbled up inside him, and he was about to say more, hiss furious things into the phone, bargain for her life, but something happened before he could. Someone grabbed him from behind, an arm around his neck, and a sweet-smelling cloth came down over his nose and mouth. He struggled, grabbed for the arm that had him in a chokehold, gasped for air, but a sense of drowsiness came over him like a descending fog. He had no idea who was attacking him, or why. He hadn't even heard them coming. How could he not have heard them coming?

He thrashed, but he was growing weaker. The phone dropped from his hand. The arms released him, and he fell facedown into the dirt.  _Scully_ , he thought, but he couldn't speak. His lips were stuck together. He tried to reach for the phone, but he couldn't move. His eyelids drooped.

Just before he drifted off, he heard a familiar voice: “Well, then. This is an interesting turn of events.” It was the voice of Peter Barclay.

\---

**_october, 1999_ **

Scully's palms pressed hard into the bark. It bit into her hands, but she ignored the sting, zeroing in on the man. He locked the door behind him, shrugging under his jacket and walking towards the house. She fumbled for her gun, curling her hand around the butt of it as she watched him, fury building. She had found the man who tried to kill her, who had taken Mulder. He could have Mulder inside. She held her breath, watching the man carefully. Considering him. She could go up and arrest him now, but that didn't seem to be a wise idea. What if he had more weapons on him? What if there was someone inside the house with Mulder, who would kill him as soon as she had the man in her custody? She couldn't risk it.

The man went slowly up the front walk, unlock and open the door and enter the house. Scully let out a breath of relief. She clenched her teeth and pulled her gun out of her holster.

She followed the line of trees around the house in an attempt to stay out of sight. When she reached the side of the house, she ran towards the most windowless spot in a crouch. When the flat of her palm hit the bricks, she crouched, pressing her shoulder against the wall.  _Keep breathing,_  she instructed. The adrenaline was so high that it pounded in her ears, and she couldn't tell if it was excitement or fear. Likely both. She could find Mulder in there, but she was terrified of what she'd find. Maybe she'd get the chance to see him again, or maybe she'd find out that he'd been dead for months, ever since that night in the woods. Or worse, maybe worse: that he'd started out alive, had survived that night in the woods and had died sometime in the six month period where she hadn't found him. Maybe she couldn't save him anymore because she hadn't looked hard enough before. Or maybe she'd been wrong all along, maybe he hadn't survived and she was an idiot for doubting what she'd seen, for believing in something as trivial as immortality and the Fountain of Youth.

Scully's breaths were coming more rapidly now; she wiped her forehead, pulled her hair back away from her face. _You don't know what you're going to find in there,_  she told herself. But this was the closest she'd ever been. She had to go inside and find out.

She reached into her pocket where she had slipped the photo, touched its glossy front. Took a deep slow breath and rounded the side of the house.

She found a back door and tried it gingerly. It swung open, creaking a little, and she grabbed it to stop it before it could creak too much. She stepped inside, winced as a floorboard creaked under her foot. She curled her hands around the butt of her gun, holding it out in front of her. She started through the house.

It was nearly empty, she was surprised to find. Outside of a dusty, ripped, old fashioned couch, she found no furniture in the house, no pictures. There was a layer of dust over everything: thin, not a layer that indicated that it'd been left standing untouched for years, but she estimated that no one had been to the house in a couple of months, at least. No signs of life. No Mulder.

She cleared the first floor, gun held out in front of her. No sign of the man, either. She nudged the closets open with one finger and found them empty, too. No cupboards. The basement had a lock on it; she'd have the man unlock it when she found him. She turned away and headed for the stairs.

She had crept over halfway up without attracting attention when a step creaked horribly under her foot. Scully stepped off immediately, but to her horror, she heard footsteps in the hall upstairs. She acted on instinct, holding her gun up with both hands and clumping the rest of the way up the stairs. As soon as she rounded the bannister, she saw the man, and roared, “FBI, keep your hands where I can see them!”

The man raised his hands, an amused grin on his face, and if Scully hadn't already known that it was the man who tried to kill them, this confirmed it. The smugness. “I remember you,” he said. “The feisty FBI agent.”

Blood roared in her ears, and it took every ounce of her strength not to shoot him where he stood. “Shut the hell up,” she snapped, holding the gun on him with one hand while she reached for her handcuffs with the other. She pointed the barrel of the gun directly at his head as she rounded him, until she was behind him. Dutifully enough, the man didn't move. She kept the gun up as she grabbed one of his hands, pinning it behind his back.  _This is how it feels, you fucking bastard,_  she thought furiously, and was sliding her gun back into her holster so she could handcuff him when he threw his head backwards, directly into her nose. She swore, pain shooting through her face, and yanked his arm further up behind him. The man yelped in pain and tried to yank away, and he might’ve succeeded if she hadn't had such a hard grip on his wrist. She shoved him forward, spinning him around and pushing him so the bannister hit him in the ribs. He came terribly close to tumbling over. She wouldn't have minded one bit, except for the fact that he wouldn't be able to lead her to Mulder.

“You have the right to remain silent,” she said, pulling the man's other hand behind his back and securing them with the handcuffs. She sniffed back the blood dripping from her nose, but it still sounded like she was speaking through tissues, her words muffled. “Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law.”

“Are you going to arrest me, Agent Scully?” the man asked, the same amusement in his voice.

She wiped the blood off of her face and yanked him away from the railing. “You deserve worse than that,” she hissed through clenched teeth. "But you will be going to prison. I'll make sure of that."

She could've questioned him right there, but she wanted to look him in the face. She pulled her gun out of her holster before dragging him towards one of the rooms by his elbow. She thought of the way he had dragged her around, like this, and she wanted to throw up. The man was still talking, saying things she wasn't listening to. She shoved him into the first room she saw and threw him down on a chair that was still left in there. Dust flew up from the cushion when he landed. She wiped the blood off her face again. “Looks like I gave you a little nosebleed, Agent,” the man said, in an almost polite way that reminded her of the fucking smoker and made her skin crawl.

She did the one thing she always wanted to do to the smoker and pressed the barrel of the gun to his forehead. “Where's Mulder?” she hissed.

To her ever-growing fury, the man just smiled. “Go ahead and shoot me,” he said.

She cocked the gun and pressed it harder into his head. “I am not playing games with you,” she snapped. "You need to tell me, right now. Where the hell is Mulder?”

“Was Mulder your friend? The one whose throat I slit?” the man replied pleasantly. “My goodness, that was months ago.”

She hit him across the face with the heel of her hand. If anyone had asked, she wouldn't have been able to tell them why she did it, because she was the one who had asked for life for a serial killer who was going to bathe her and kill her, and she knew it was wrong to do this, to let personal grudges get in the way and harm a criminal she had in her custody, but the anger boiling inside her was too much. This man had stabbed her and laughed at her in the same breath; she'd felt the physical pain of what he'd done to her for months after. He still haunted her fucking dreams. This man had killed Mulder or taken Mulder, and she wanted to know why. She wanted to know what had happened to Mulder. She'd waited months without knowing, had nightmare after nightmare, people giving her pitying looks and his mother planning his funeral, and she'd watched this man order her partner's throat slit. He could very well be dead, and it would be this man's fault. Tears burned at the back of her eyes, her nose stinging like crazy. She blinked hard and spoke. “I'm not going to ask again,” she said evenly. She pressed the gun into the side of his face. “Where is he? Where is my partner? What the hell did you do to him?”

“I hardly know what to tell you, my dear,” the man said innocently. “You were there the night it happened. You know what we did to him; you watched it happen.”

She was close to hitting him again, but she forced herself to remain calm. She took a deep breath and said, “I was there. I survived. But when I woke up, he was gone. What did you do to him? Where did you take him?”

The man shrugged. “I'm sorry, Agent, but I'm afraid your partner is dead.”

Scully's breath caught unevenly in her throat. It was what she had feared all along, Mulder being dead, but something in her just wouldn't accept it.  _I would know,_ she told herself, that old cliché, as tears pricked her eyes. _I would've known._ He was her partner. She'd saved his life a million times. She'd helped him play dead once. She might have been in love with him. She would've  _known_. She would have. Wouldn't she?

She felt like she was going to vomit.

The weight of the ocean roaring in her ears, she barely heard what the man said next. “We buried him in the woods that night, after he passed.” He cocked his head at her, disbelief. “You didn't know your partner was dead?”


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warning for violence and kidnapping, largely in the exact context of That One Scene from chapter 3.

**chapter seven**

**_may, 1999_ **

Through the haze, he heard voices, muffled talking. Something like, “I thought you were finished with all this,” and, “They do? Well, that's convenient,” and, “Close, huh? Interesting. Very interesting. I suppose it would be unwise not to take advantage and preserve the facade. Meet you in an hour?” He groaned, turning over in his sleep, swimming in and out of the darkness. A sleepy haze overtook him.

He woke slowly, as if coming from underwater. He tried to roll over, groaning to himself, but for some reason, his hands wouldn't separate. They hit his stomach together like a dead weight. For a second, he thought he should just to go back to sleep. He felt limp, lazy, his limbs horrible heavy. His eyelids drooped, his mouth fell open. He was perfectly content to just lie there and let his horrible drowsiness pull him back under.

Until he remembered, and he was suddenly wide awake. The phantom memory of Scully weakly calling his name into the phone, the sounds of her being hit and her captor taunting him over the phone. His eyes snapped open, he rolled over frantically. He found that his hands were taped together in front of him, and he pressed them into the leather of the driver’s seat as he struggled to sit up. He was in the back of a car. The Barclays had brought him there.

He rolled his shoulders, fury brewing inside of him. He had no idea what was going on, why the Barclays had come after him, but he was furious. He needed to get to Scully. He shifted on the seat, banged on the grimy window with his numb fingers. “Hey!” he shouted. “Hey! What the hell is going on here?”

If he had to guess why the Barclays had grabbed him, he would guess that it had something to do with him finding the fucking Fountain-tree thing and whatever cliché he could come up with about keeping immortality to themselves or whatever. He'd suspected that they might be immortal when he'd first met them, but he hadn't expected them to come after him. He didn't have time for this. He just needed to convince them to let him go so he could go help Scully. If she’d been taken by the serial killer, then she didn’t have a lot of time.

He clenched his teeth, banged on the window again. “Let me the fuck out of here!” he shouted. “This is ridiculous! We can talk about this!”

A face appeared on the other side of the window, smiling at him cheerily. It was one of the brothers—Andrew, maybe. He yanked the door open, and Mulder nearly fell out onto the ground. Andrew gripped a handful of his shirt and dragged him up, shoving him against the side of the car. Mulder winced as the handle jabbed into his side. “What was that, Mr. Mulder?” Andrew said cheerfully.

Mulder was breathing hard, trying to yank out of the grip. He saw Samuel watching him silently, a cigarette in hand. “You need to let me go,” he said sternly.

“I'm afraid that's not a possibility,” said Andrew, gripping one of Mulder's arms. He nodded to Samuel, who dropped the cigarette and came to take the other and began leading him away.

Mulder dug in his heels in an attempt to stop their motion, but the men were strong and pulled him forward, causing him to stumble along though the rocks and dirt. “I am a federal agent, you're making a huge mistake,” he insisted. “I'm sorry if I encroached on your belongings, that was not my intention.”

“We don't take kindly to people using our tree, Mr. Mulder,” Samuel said in his deadly quiet voice, and Mulder understood why he had lied about the tree’s existence. Whether it was supposed to be mind games or if the man just didn’t like having to kidnap people, this was the end result if anyone found it. Mulder couldn’t get a read on whether or not Samuel was enjoying this, but the guy was eerie either way.

There was the sudden sharpness of a knife at his chest, a blade that felt curved. Mulder shivered. “Not at all,” Samuel added.

“I'll apologize, I'll pay you, whatever you want,” he said, almost pleading. All he could hear in the back of his mind was the clatter of Scully dropping the phone. He had to find her. She did not have a lot of time, even if she was immortal. He couldn’t let the woman on the other line hurt her. “Whatever you want,” he said again. “Just let me go, please.”

Samuel was smiling strangely at him. “Right this way, Mr. Mulder,” he said, and pushed Mulder through a copse of trees.

His mouth went dry when he saw her, his heart pounding hard in his chest. There she was, mouth taped shut, hands behind her back, blade to her throat. She looked scared and strong and steely, and a frightened sadness flickered over her face when she saw him. Scully. “Scully?” he stammered. He stopped walking and was shoved forward, his feet scuffing the ground.

Of all the things he'd considered, the idea that the Fountain-crazed people in the woods were the same as the serial killer who they'd been looking for all this time, were with the person who'd kidnapped Scully. He'd never even considered it.

“She mentioned you knew each other,” said Peter Barclay, the man who was holding Scully against his chest. The last voice he'd heard before he passed out from chloroform. Peter offered Mulder a smug smile, and Mulder wanted to kill him, his eyes glued to the blade at Scully's white throat.

“What the hell is she doing here?” Mulder growled through the fear building up inside of him. “What do you want with her?”

(He knew, but he didn't want to admit it to himself. He'd seen what had happened to the victims, but he never really thought it would be them.)

He was trying to pull away from Samuel and Andrew. He twisted his wrists in the tape, but there were no give; it held fast. His teeth pressed together hard, trying to keep from vomiting, as he watched Peter trace Scully's neck with his knife. God, he was going to kill him. “Same we want with you, Mr. Mulder,” Peter said.

“Let her go,” Mulder spat, teeth still pressed together to hold back nausea. Scully was still watching him, worry in her eyes and steel layered over it. She wanted to kill these men, too. If he could get their hands free, he would let her, but he would settle for her escaping with her life, if that was what it took. “Don't you lay a fucking hand on her.”

Their captors seemed to think that was hilarious. Mulder could feel Scully's eyes, wide and frightened, on him as he was shoved away from Andrew into Samuel. Samuel held him fast while Andrew pulled a roll of duct tape out of his pocket. Mulder froze at the sight. They were going to kill them. They were going to kill them, and Scully might survive, but there were no guarantees, and they were going to hurt them. He didn't know if the leaves had worked, and he didn't want to die. He gulped, eyes shifting back and forth between Andrew and Scully.

Peter was still moving the blade over Scully's throat. One quick movement, and he drew blood. Scully winced. Mulder's stomach turned over, panic coursing through him. He yanked against the arms holding him back, blurting, “Let her go. You can have me, take me, do whatever you want with me, just let her go.” He watched the drop of blood trace her skin, thought,  _Please, don't. Please._ He met Peter’s eyes, pleading.

There was a rustling sound, a muffled noise that might’ve been his name if tape hadn’t hindered it, and he looked down to see Scully shaking her head, fear flashing in her eyes like a trapped animal. He looked her in the eye, his heart pounding so hard he could feel it everywhere: his fingers, his toes. He'd do anything to save her, anything. She shook her head again, as if to tell him no. As if to tell him not to trade himself for her. She said his name behind the tape again.

Their fight before he left for the woods ran through his mind, their phone conversation where he'd heard her being kidnapped. The things he'd said to her. He gulped, opened his mouth to tell her he was sorry, he was so sorry. But a sticky piece of tape caught the words in his throat. Effectively muted him. He'd never get a chance to tell her. He grunted in protest under the tape. Scully.

Andrew said, “Time to be quiet. No trades in this game, I'm afraid.” He tossed the roll of duct tape from one hand to another, like it was easy. Like kidnapping two people was a walk in the park.

Fury flickered through Mulder again; he wanted to kill these men. He wanted to make them suffer, but he wasn't sure if they could be killed. And it looked like they were going to try to kill him and his partner first. He kept looking at Scully, trying to say everything he wanted to say without speaking. _I love you,_  he thought.  _And I'm sorry. I'm so, so sorry._

Scully moved like lightning, sudden and whip-quick as she pulled away, kicking Peter in the groin. He let out a pained grunt as she ran a few paces, and Mulder looked desperately for a venue to escape, regain control, he had an advantage that Scully didn't since his hands were in front of them, but it didn't work. Peter and Andrew were right behind her, grabbing her before she could get any further. Mulder swallowed back his rage; he would kill these men if he got the chance. Scully thrashed, trying to get away, but they had her between them. “Feisty thing,” Peter laughed, and Mulder pictured putting a bullet in his brain, wriggling his wrists against the stickiness. “It's really unfortunate.”

Scully thrust an elbow into Samuel’s stomach, and Mulder saw it suddenly, the knife tracing the line of Scully's hip, moonlight bouncing off of the blade. He grunted muffledly in protest, and she looked at him, the blue of her eyes bright in the darkness. And then they stabbed her.

He cried out, trying desperately to pull away, to get to her. Scully's eyes went sharp, then dull, tears pooling in her eyes. She started to struggle, but the knife sunk in again, blood seeping through her shirt. God, they couldn't, they had to stop hurting her. He was going to throw up. The knife came out and in again, and Scully went limp, caving in at` the middle like she'd been punched in the stomach. Mulder grabbed at the arms around his chest with numb fingers, scratching, trying to get away. _God, Scully, no,_  he thought hysterically, pleading with a God he didn’t believe it. It had to be impossible, because Scully didn’t die, they always escaped at the last minute.  _Please, no. No._

She was groaning with pain behind her gag, and he was crying a little, and they had to stop hurting her. Her eyes swiveled over to him, glassy with the pain. He dug his fingernails into the skin of his captor, trying to draw blood,  _let me go, you bastard,_ and then they stabbed Scully again. She fell to her knees, and Mulder called out for her. She went down backwards, on her back on the ground, her hair fanned out behind her head like the blood pooling under her side. She looked so helpless, mute and pale, like a murder victim. That's exactly what she was, they hurt her until she was rendered helpless, she was going to die, and he was going to fucking kill them.

He pulled hard again, trying to get away, and they finally let him. He crashed to his knees beside Scully, reached down and clumsily pressed his hands into her side in an attempt to stop the bleeding. Tears dripped from his eyes, and no, please, Scully, don't die. Don't die. He didn't know if she could die, but he was terrified she would. She looked up at him dully, mouth sealed, tape moving in and out as she struggled for breath. He pushed his fingers harder against the wounds, trying to keep the blood in.  

They were laughing behind him, and then they were yanking him back, taking him away from her. He planted his feet and they wore grooves in the ground as he was dragged. He whimpered her name under the tape. A few more feet, and he could barely see her face. Scully, Scully.

He was pinned with an arm across the collarbone. “She was right,” said Peter. The patriarch. He had orchestrated all of this. “They are close.”

The bite of metal suddenly pressing in, cutting. Mulder let out a small whimper, a gasping sound as the blade pushed further in, severing cords.  _Scully_ , he thought as he tried to keep breathing, but it was too late.  _Scully,_  he thought as blood dripped down the front of his shirt, as his breaths stilled because he had nothing to breathe with, as his vision went spotty and black.

Darkness descended.

\---

**_october, 1999_ **

“You're lying,” Scully said, but she felt like she was underwater. The ocean roaring in her ears. She couldn't breathe through her swelled nose, someone was sitting on her chest. He  _had_ to be lying. Mulder couldn't be…

“I am not lying, my dear,” said the man. “He died that night. I don't know why you didn't. I really thought you had, when we left you there.”

“Well, I don't know what to tell you,” Scully snapped. Her eyes were burning, but she would not cry in front of this man. She swallowed back the lump in her throat. “You're one of the Barclays, aren't you? You murdered Virginia Barclay.”

The man laughed. Blood dripped from Scully's nose; she wiped it away furiously. This was it, this was the cancer, come back to make her nose drip with blood and eat away at every single part of her life. “Well, that is amusing,” he said. “Very amusing indeed.”

“I don't see why it's amusing,” Scully bit out. “What was she, your daughter? You murdered your daughter and seven other people. All because of their connection to Alfred Fellig.” Seven people, she thought, and her gut rolled with nausea. Six without Mulder, but if Mulder was really dead…

“I don't know an Alfred Fellig,” said the man. Barclay, whatever.

“He stayed with your family in the 1930’s. Worked at the Barclay Fish company for a brief period.” Scully wiped her nose again, breathing raspily. “Don't pretend you don't know. Janet Rice, Oliver Alexander, Stan Jameson. Kenneth Rigby, Natalie Walker, Peyton Ritter, who just barely managed to survive. Mulder—” (Her voice cracked only a little on his name.) “—and me. Dana Scully. And Virginia Barclay. All with a connection to Fellig, aka Henry Strand,  aka L.H. Rice, aka Louis Brady. His alias just before he disappeared in 1930, when he departed to Florida and worked at a fishing company at some point between 1930 and 1939.  _Your_ family’s fishing company, just through those trees. I assume he stayed in his house during that time. I'm sure your ancestors or parents or whoever—or maybe you yourself, I dunno—knew that he was here. And that is why you killed these people. You cannot deny that you did. I saw what you did to me, to Mulder.”

Barclay was laughing, his body shaking with amusement. “Seems like you have everything figured out, Miss Scully,” he said.

She saw red for a moment. Blood was dripping out of her nose, and she was staring at Mulder's murderer. The man who had killed her partner. Who had finally taken him away from her. All those times she had saved him for nothing. All those months of faith, of believing the way that Mulder always had, and what did she get? Mulder had gone looking for the Fountain of Youth for her, so she wouldn't have to be alone. And now, she had lost him. He hadn't found it, and now he would never find all those things he was looking for. He was gone.

She was ready to arrest him, shoot him, hit him, hurt him, kill him, and she couldn't have told anyone what her plans were in that moment, but the phone rang before she could decide. Not her phone, which was still off in her car; Barclay's phone, in his pocket. “That would be my sons,” said Barclay.

Scully blinked hard, breathing rapidly. “The ones who hurt Mulder?”

Barclay shrugged innocently.

Scully yanked the phone out of his pocket and answered it. She prodded Barclay under his chin with the gun, biting out, “Say hello,” as she put it on speakerphone. Like she was in some kind of hostage negotiation, like she hadn’t been on the other end of this, handcuffed and with a phone shoved up to her ear. She was the biggest hypocrite in the world. Or maybe she wanted to know what it was like for once, to be the one holding the gun, or maybe this man had murdered her partner. She prodded him with the gun again.

Barclay said hello in an even voice.

“Father? Are you finished cleaning up the house?” a familiar voice said on the other end. She recognized it: the voice of the one who had covered Mulder's mouth with tape.

Scully stepped back, holding the gun at Barclay. “This is Special Agent Scully from the FBI,” she said, trying to speak steadily. “I have your father in custody. Who am I speaking to?”

A stunned laugh on the other end. “You're the woman, aren't you? The one who disappeared from where we left her.”

Rage built up in her throat, and she hissed, “Yes, that was me. You abducted me and my partner and tried to kill us.”

Another voice, the voice of the man who cut Mulder's throat, came on. “This is Samuel Barclay. Father, are you there?”

“I'm here, son,” said the oldest Barclay. “This woman is very angry, son.”

Scully breathed in and out slowly, trying to reign it in. “Stop talking,” she snapped. “Stop it right fucking now.”

“What is it you want, Miss Scully?” one of the sons, Samuel, asked.

She was furious because she hated it when people called her Miss Scully—she got it entirely too much at the FBI as it was—but her head was still together. She was going to say that she wanted them brought to justice for what they did to the other victims, because that was what she wanted, what she'd always wanted, and then she remembered Mulder. Mulder, her partner who she'd failed. She had to be sure that he was dead.

“Bring me proof,” she said, and God help her, her voice trembled like a leaf in the wind. She tried not to care. She didn't want to see Mulder's corpse—she never, ever wanted to see that—but he didn't deserve to stay in the Florida forest. She could take him home to be buried with his father, give his mother the funeral she wanted. She owed that to him, no matter how hard it would be for her. “I want proof that Mulder is dead, and I'll give you your father back.”

(She wouldn't let them go, not really, she'd try to bring them in if she could, but three people was too much for her to arrest on her own. She'd bring the evidence to Kravert, they could organize a manhunt; she knew the general area now, Wolf Trap Bay. They wouldn't be gone forever. She needed to take Mulder home.)

“You want… proof that Agent Mulder is dead,” said the other brother, the one who had answered the phone, and it wasn't a question, but it was enough to make Scully question what Barclay had said. There was uncertainty there. He wasn't sure of what he was saying.

“Yes,” she said shortly. “Because your father told me that Mulder died that night in the woods. Is that true?” A terrifying thought occurred to her: if she was wrong about Mulder's death, then there was no reason that they wouldn't just kill him and bring her the body. Proof that he was dead.

“Yes,” Samuel said after a pause. “Yes, of course it is true.”

Barclay was staring at the phone in regret.

“You're lying,” Scully said wildly. “One of you is lying, and I want to know who.”

“I can assure you, Miss Scully…” Barclay began.

“Shut up!” Scully roared. “Shut up right now! What happened? What did you do to my partner?”

“I don't know what you're talking about,” Samuel said.

“You fucking liar!” She slammed the table beside Barclay's chair in fury. “Tell me what you did to him!”

“You already know what we did to him,” Barclay said. “You were there.”

The images flickered through her head, like a silent movie sped up. Blood pounded in her ears; she slammed the heel of her hand on the table again, shouted, “Where is he?” Her head was pounding, spinning like a merry-go-round. She was dizzy. She had to know. God, she missed him so much. The words spilled out of her mouth in a torrent. “Where is he? Where's Mulder?”

There was a clattering sound on the other end, and then a stunned voice came through the speakers. A familiar voice, that filled Scully with unimaginable relief and fear. Relief and fear, her battling emotions.

“Scully?” Mulder said on the other end, his voice full of surprise.


	8. Chapter 8

**chapter eight**

**_may, 1999_ **

Darkness. Pain washing over him in waves, drowning him. He couldn't breathe, gasping for air like a fish out of water, and yet he was still alive.

He felt the indistinct feeling of being dragged through the dirt, numb hands pulling through the leaves. He made a feeble gasping noise, opened his eyes. His vision blurred. The darkness descended again.

Minutes or hours later, he felt a car bumping beneath him, his head rattling against the seat. Later, the hardness of a dirt floor beneath him. He scraped his fingernails against the dirt, looking for an avenue to sit up. He gasped for breath, and found nothing. His throat was still severed; he felt the ragged, separated ends. So how was he still alive? How was he still alive?

Where was Scully?

\---

He heard voices above him, familiar voices that made him want to lash out, hurt people. He gasped for breath, trying to call for Scully, but all that came out of his mouth was a raspy gasp. Like his goddamn throat had been cut.

He reached up with one tentative hand and touched his neck, found what he could only describe as new skin there. Strangely soft and sensitive. He winced and let his head hit the dirt floor.

\---

When he swam back up to consciousness, it happened slowly. At first, he was aware of the light streaming in through a window. And then it was the griminess of his clothes, plastered to his torso with dirt and dried blood. He winced, rolling from his stomach to his back. He found his hands unbound, and so he tried to shake some feeling back into them. He opened his mouth and found that he could speak, his vocal cords tender but there. As if the tendons in his neck had just sewn themselves back up.

The leaves had worked. He'd lived through what should've been a fatal wound. Mulder touched his throat and found it scarless. He sucked in air gratefully. And then his mind went straight to Scully. If she had survived her heart being pulled out, could she have survived…?

Mulder turned onto his stomach, surveying the room he was in. It seemed to be more of a basement than anything. He brushed his fingers over his throat again, scanned the dark corners and croaked, “Scully.”

If they'd brought him here, wouldn't they bring her, too?

“Scully,” he rasped, more insistent, before falling into a coughing fit. He tasted copper at the back of his throat. He dug his fingers into the dirt floor to try and move, but he was too weak, fatigue assaulting him from every side, and besides, he could already tell she wasn't in here. He wiped his mouth and lay back down, his heart pounding with the effort.

Had he misjudged everything? Had she died and he managed to survive something that should've killed them both? He didn't know if he could live with that. Or was she simply in another room of the house? He would've shouted for her, but his throat burned as if he'd had a sore throat for days instead of had everything there severed and then regrown.

The preferable option was that she'd both survived and managed to escape. He didn't want her to be here, in what he could only assume what in the hands of immortal serial killers. Fucking Fountain of Youth. He'd say that he wished he'd never gone looking for it, but he didn't know if Scully had been a target from the beginning or if she'd been taken because of him. Either way, the thought made him feel nauseous. He swallowed it back and let his eyes slide closed.

Except that didn't work, because he instantly saw them hurting her. Knife in her side, her eyes staring up at him. Her blood between his fingers. Her life leaking out right in front of him.

Mulder rolled to one side and vomited on the floor. His eyes were wet with tears. He'd watched her die, and even if she had survived, he would never be able to forget that. If she had died, he didn't know what he'd do. He missed her immensely in these moments of consciousness.

On an instinct, he reached into his back pocket and found his wallet. (His phone was gone, but they'd left him with his wallet. Go figure.) It was corny, but he knew he had a picture of the two of them inside, and he wanted to see a version of Scully who wasn't dying. He shook the wallet a little and it came fluttering out, folded in half so that no one could see what it was at first glance. The crease was directly over his face, he saw when he unfolded it. He ignored that and focused on her. She was smiling in the photo. He wanted to remember what that looked like. He ran a grimy, rust-brown fingernail over the image of her face.

At some point, he drifted out of conscious again, his hand flat over the photo.

\---

Mulder woke again to footsteps coming down the steps. A few steps more and he saw who it was: Peter Barclay. Anger hit him like a brick; he pressed his hands into the floor, pushing up until he was sitting, but his head spun madly. He curled his hand around the photo to hide it from sight, reaching down to tuck it in his pocket. He tried to demand where Scully was, but all he got out was, “Where's…” before he fell into a coughing fit.

“Here.” The next thing he knew, Barclay was kneeling beside him. “Drink this,” he said, passing Mulder a cup of what looked like water. Mulder didn't want to risk it, but his mouth was dry and his throat was incredibly sore. He took the cup and gulped it, dissolving into coughs again.

Peter rocked back on his heels, staring down at Mulder with a considering glance.

Mulder wiped his mouth, breathing hard. “Where's Scully?” he rasped up at the man, glaring at him.

“That seems to be the question, isn't it,” Barclay said.

Overwhelmed by the effort it took to move, Mulder sat back against the stony wall. “What the hell do you mean?”

“She's gone,” he said, and for a second, terror shot through Mulder so profound that he thought he might vomit again. But Barclay kept talking. “We left your partner where she was so that my daughter could dump her in the park, where she'd left her other victims. We brought you back to the house intending to bury you, at first, but then we saw that you were still alive. So it took longer that intended to secure you. After it was all done, we received a furious call from my daughter, angry because your partner wasn't where we'd left her. She was gone."

Mulder sagged against the wall with relief, wiping sweat from his forehead. “She's gone?” he asked, balling together his trembling hands in his lap. “Like she walked away?”

“I assume so,” Peter sighed. “And I'm really at a loss for why. I don't think she ever found the tree that you did. Did she?”

Mulder shook his head, copper in his mouth. “She didn't,” he said, understanding. "I was alone. She didn't even know about it."

“Well, then.” Barclay crossed his arms. “My daughter has been looking for someone like your partner. Someone who could survive fatal wounds.”

“The other victims,” Mulder muttered, realizing. That was the motive they had never figured out.

“Yes, the ones found in the park in Tallahassee. None of them were successful, you'd imagine. Until your partner. Which means that she is the one my daughter has been looking for.”

Mulder scrambled against the wall, fingers scraping the rock as he tried to stand. “No,” he said. “No, no, she's not.”

“How else could she have survived a knife to the side several times?” Peter said simply. “My daughter had reason for targeting your partner, and it looks like she had good reason. We simply tried to kill you two together because it was convenient.”

Mulder wanted to hit him. He had Scully's attack burned into his brain because it was  _convenient_? Fucking bastards. He clenched his teeth and pressed his fingers harder against the wall. “It was a mistake, like the others. It was just a fluke,” he said frantically, words spilling out of his mouth. “The place you stabbed her wasn't fatal. I'm a federal agent, I know these things. It's just a coincidence, I swear. It's a miracle she survived, but Scully is not immortal.”

Peter knelt in front of him. He pulled out a knife with rust-red splotches along the handle and wiped it on his pant legs. The knife he'd used on them. Mulder swallowed.

“You wouldn't be lying to me to protect your partner,” Barclay said quietly. “Would you?”

Mulder shook his head, deadly serious. “She's not immortal,” he said. “I swear. I'm just as surprised she survived as you are.”

Barclay looked him in the eye, steely and stern. “Well, then,” he said. “Trying to kill your partner was largely a favor to Ginny, but I do not approve of her activities, killing these people. We've only ever killed people who tried to use the tree. And the people who survived… well, we didn't let them use the tree again, of course, but we also couldn't let them leave."

Mulder swallowed again. He figured that would be the outcome, but he didn't want to face it. He wanted to go home.

“I suppose that since you'll be our guest for a while, we should believe you,” Barclay said.

Mulder nodded, his palms cold and sweaty. “I suppose so.”

Barclay smiled grimly. “Come with me, Mr. Mulder,” he said. “I'll show you to your room.”

\---

**_october, 1999_ **

Scully's stomach dropped out from under her when she heard Mulder's voice on the phone. The gun was still in her hand; she could barely feel it, her fingers numb and cold with sweat. Her hands were trembling. “Mulder?” she said quietly, near stammering. She couldn't believe it.

“Scully, it's me,” he said on the other end. His voice was trembling too.

She swallowed back tears at the back of her throat, wrapped her hands harder around the gun to steady it. “Are you okay?” she asked. She really couldn't believe it, the reality of him, his voice on the other end,  _alive_. Mulder.

There was a clatter on the other end, a muffled grunt, and a voice of one of the sons came on. Samuel, she thought. “Now you know the truth, Agent Scully,” he said. “Your partner is alive.”

“I want to talk to him,” she snapped, furious.

“Well, we would like our father back,” said the first brother, more distant in the background.

“Kidnapping is a federal crime,” Scully hissed. “I have your father under arrest for attempted murder and kidnapping. I could arrest the both of you on the same charges.” She could feel every heartbeat again, her panic as she wondered what they’d done to keep Mulder from talking.

“But you won’t,” one of the brothers said. “Because there's just you there and you can't overpower three people. And if you do try to arrest us or take our father in, we'll just kill your partner.”

There was more clattering on the other end. Scully breathed in sharply, resisting the urge to shout his name. “So you're saying if I bring you your father, you'll let my partner go?” she said carefully, but not without letting venom slide into her voice.

“Yes,” the other brother, Samuel, said. “That is what we are saying.”

Scully breathed in and out, looked at Peter Barclay where he sat in front of her. He was looking at her innocently, like he was a child who didn't know what was going on. “Let me talk to him,” she said.

“No. That's not part of the deal,” said the first brother. “We have the upper hand and you know it. Now I'm going to tell you what to do, and you'll listen if you want to see him again.”

Scully inhaled, exhaled. It was irresponsible of her to do this. This man and his sons were murderers; she knew she should've brought Kravert or Skinner. She couldn't do a hostage exchange, she couldn't trade a murderer for her partner. It was against Bureau policy. It was unthinkable.

But it was Mulder. He was alive. His voice was echoing in her ears. She couldn't leave him here. She couldn't.

“I'm listening,” she said.

\---

She drove Peter Barclay to the agreed meeting spot. It was a spot on the other side of Grand Bay. Her hands clutched the wheel too hard the entire time. She didn't talk to her passenger, the man who had tried to kill them. Mulder's wallet sat in her pocket like a stone, the photograph just as heavy in her jacket pocket. Her pulse didn't slow down the entire way there.

She was going to see him again. She was going to see him again, and that fact both made her giddy and absolutely terrified her. It had been six months, the longest they'd been apart since they'd met; even her abduction had only been three. She almost smiled. Remembered that they had the upper hand, that they could kill him if she fucked up, and she shuddered from head to toe.

She parked as soon as she saw the headlights facing her. The car before her turned them off, and she could see the people inside. The sons in the front seat, and Mulder in the back. Mulder, who was there, right there. He was really alive, it hadn't been some illusion. She swallowed. She couldn't see his expression, but he didn't look hurt. He looked okay, whole, real.

She reached down and turned off her own headlights with a trembling hand. As soon as they were off, Mulder looked straight at her through the windshield, his eyes burning into her even from yards away. She held his gaze, swallowing nervously.

“You want to see your partner again,” Barclay said matter-of-factly from next to her. “My daughter told me you were close, but I had no idea.”

“Shut the hell up,” Scully growled, palming the key to the handcuffs and getting out of the car.

As she rounded the back of the car to get Peter out, she was reminded of the hostage exchange on the bridge, when Mulder had traded his sister for her. She still couldn't believe he'd done that at times, traded the sister he’d spent over half his life looking for, just to keep her safe. As she pulled Barclay out of the car, she watched them take Mulder out carefully. She nearly couldn't breathe. They had a gun to his head and his hands bound in front of him. Somehow, somehow, there was no scar on his throat.

Their eyes met over Barclay's shoulder. His were huge, glued to her. She held his gaze as they began to move forward, one of the brothers with Mulder and her with Barclay.

They were supposed to get as close as possible to make the exchange. Scully watched them both carefully as they drew closer, as she guided Peter by his handcuffed arms. Mulder was wearing some awful ruffly shirt that looked like it was at least a hundred years old. He met her eyes, trying to say a million things all at once. They stepped closer. Scully let go of Barclay and lowered the hand holding the key to her gun, reaching out with the other to grab Mulder's elbow. As soon as she touched him, it was real. She resisted the urge to throw her arms around him, drawing him towards her gently, towards safety.

The brother holding Mulder let go, reaching out and yanking Barclay with him. Scully let him go, lifting her hand briefly to toss the key to the brother before immediately moving it back to her gun. She kept her hand on Mulder's elbow like a tether, but she kept her eyes on the men, memorizing their faces for Kravert. She wasn't going to let them get away with this.

“Gun,” Mulder muttered in her ear.

His voice was such a surprise that it took her a moment to register. “What?”

“Scully, gun,” he said, his voice rising in panic, and then his shoulder plowed into her as he tackled her to the ground. A gunshot exploded above them.

Over Mulder's head against her chin, Scully saw the other brother stand from the car, aiming a shotgun at them. Closer, the other brother aiming his gun. They'd double-crossed them.

Scully fumbled for her gun and fired at the other brother, the closer one. She couldn't see where it hit him because everyone was moving, it all was happening so fast. Mulder kicked out at the father, knocking him off of his feet, his balance thrown off by the handcuffs. Scully crawled out from under Mulder, yanking him to his feet alongside her. Her car keys were in her pocket. If she could just get them to the car…

The gun fired again, but not at them. Her car sunk down on one side. They'd shot out her tire.

“Run,” Mulder hissed in her ear.

The father was starting to crawl across the ground, closer to them, his foot moving towards his son's gun to kick it to him.

Scully found one of Mulder's hands from where they were tied together, gripped it in hers and ran.

The gunshots whizzed past them. One whizzed past Scully's face, so close that she could feel the friction in the air and Mulder hissed through his teeth. She ducked on instinct and kept running. When they reached the cover of trees, she moved behind them, using the barrier as an avenue to fire at the brother with the shotgun. It hit him in the shoulder, and he swore, falling back against the car. The father was already standing. The handcuffs dangled from one wrist now.

“They're just going to keep coming,” Mulder said in her ear. “Scully, they'll heal, they're used to this kind of pain by now so shooting them won't stop them for long. We have to go.”

She turned to face him. Their eyes met; his were weary, panicked. She nodded.

They ran, weaving through the trees. Mulder ran a little clumsily, his center of balance thrown off by his bound hands, but Scully kept ahold of his left hand in her right, trying her best to guide him. He stumbled as a gunshot exploded through the woods; they veered off in another direction, Scully's free hand clutching her gun harder. Another gunshot, another crazed turn, and the ground was vanishing between them. They were falling down into darkness, with no time to scream.

Scully hit the ground hard, knocking the wind out of her, her hand slipping out of his. She scrambled around to find him, the moonlight providing poor light. He was lying behind her, twisting to try and sit up. She fumbled for him, wincing as the pain shot through her ribs, pressed her hand against his cheek and asked, “Are you okay?”

He nodded distractedly, looking frantically up at the hole they'd fallen through. “Here, over this way,” he whispered. “They're getting closer.”

He nudged her towards some sort of rock-dirt formation in the tunnel. She went automatically, the two of them ducking into a dark place out of sight of the hole. Mulder pressed against her, pushing her further into the corner, his hands flat against her stomach. She wrapped an arm around his ribcage as if she could pull him further into the hiding place. A gunshot exploded closer, and they sunk to the ground together, his chin pressing into her forehead. They breathed in tandem as footsteps above them grew closer, as a flashlight beam swept over the hole. The moments seemed to stretch out like taffy, the both of them holding their breaths as the Barclays searched above. Her heart was thudding with fear.

Someone said, “We don't have time to search the networks. They're not down there, anyway.”

Scully let out a relieved breath as the footsteps went away, as the voices that made her spine crawl with fear grew quieter and more indecipherable. Her nose brushed Mulder's shoulder as he sat back, their knees pressed together. She shifted so she was balanced, the two of them facing each other. “I think they're gone now,” Mulder muttered, looking down at his hands in his lap. "We're okay."

It seemed to hit her all at once, out of nowhere. “You're not dead,” she croaked.

He looked up at her, their noses brushing. His eyes were huge and dark, and he was looking at her as if he couldn't believe she was really there. It had been so long since she'd seen him. She wrapped her arms around him fiercely. He leaned hard into her, pressing his face into her hair. “You're not dead,” she whispered, clenching a hand in his hair.

She could feel his heart pounding through their clothes, the shaky breaths he was taking against her. His fingertips brushed over her stomach before clenching around her shirt, tugging her closer. She hugged him harder, her nose brushing the side of his neck. “Neither are you,” he said hoarsely, tightening his grip on her shirttail. “You're really here.”

She kissed his cheek lingeringly, and he shivered in her grip. “Jesus, Mulder, I thought you were…” she whispered. She ran her fingers through his hair again, stroked his back before letting go.

He was looking at her like she was the entire world, right here in this hole in the ground in Florida. Like she was all that mattered, and it made her want to cry because she'd driven him away and she hadn't found him for months,  _months_. She fumbled for the knots around his wrists, loosening them until the ropes fell away, rubbed her hands over the indentations around his wrists. He shook some feeling back into his hands before gathering her up in his arms, pulling her closer than before, his hands flat against her back. “Scully,” he mumbled into her shoulder. “Scully…”

“I never stopped looking,” she whispered, arms tight around his neck. “I hoped you were alive. I prayed… I would've looked as long as it took.” A tear dripped on the shoulder of the ugly shirt he was wearing.

His cheek was rough with stubble against hers. He held her with a great deal of tenderness, desperation; she could feel him trembling against her. “I missed you so much,” he said into her shirt. She sniffled into the side of his neck. “I can't believe you… I'm so sorry. God, Scully, I'm so sorry. I never should've left you alone there.”

“It wasn't your fault, Mulder, you're lucky to be alive…” she whispered, balling her fist in his shirt.

“No, no… in the motel room, in Tallahassee.”

Oh. She'd forgotten about that, their stupid fucking fight. She held onto him tighter. “Forget about it,” she said miserably.

“I'm so sorry, Scully…” he whispered.

She was shaking her head. “No, forget about it, Mulder. I have.”

“I had to watch them hurt you,” he whispered, and she shuddered. His blood on his shirtfront, the pain in her side, burning. She’d had to watch them hurt him, and she’d never forget it. She tugged at his shirt, her nose brushing his pulse point, and he shuddered again. He was  _alive_. “God, are you okay?” he asked, tucking hair behind her ear, cupping the side of her face, his thumb rubbing her cheekbone.

“I'm fine, Mulder.” She leaned back, pushed the hair away from his forehead and smiled shakily. He kept his arms tight around her, but he was looking at her tremulously. She reached down and ran her fingers over his throat, the smoothness where there should've been a scar. “Are you…” she started, and he nodded. “God, Mulder.” She leaned in and kissed the line of his throat, wiped her eyes. He kissed the top of her head, his hands warm along her spine.

She leaned her head against his collarbone, listened to his heart thundering in her ears. “We, uh,” she started, and then smiled, almost against her will. He was real, he was alive, she'd found him. “We need to try and figure out how to get back to town… now that I know where the killers are, I can call Kravert and we'll be in the clear…”

“No, Scully, wait,” Mulder said suddenly. She pulled back to look him in the eye, surprise flickering over her face. “The Barclay men should… absolutely be arrested,” he said with a tad of dark humor in his tone, “for what they did to us, but, Scully… they aren't the killers.”

She blinked incredulously. “What?”

“They didn't kill them, none of the victims,” he said impatiently. “None of the ones found in the park. That was their sister.”

“Their sister?” she asked. “Who the hell is that? Why did her family go after us instead of her just doing it herself?”

Mulder met her eyes, laughed softly but not humorlessly. “God, I missed you,” he said. “You really won't believe this one, Scully.”

She reached for his hand, intertwining their fingers. “Try me,” she said.

“Virginia Barclay,” he said.

She blinked. She was embarrassed to realize that she hadn't made the connection in the first place, when she heard the names, but she was so focused on Mulder. It made sense that they would be connected, though. But what did Mulder mean? “The first victim?” she clarified.

“Not exactly. Scully, not only is Virginia Barclay still alive, but she just so happens to be the serial killer you were looking for.”


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warning for violence, mentions of suicide/suicidal ideation by a minor character (similar to fellig in tithonus)

**chapter nine**

**_july, 1999_ **

In the months since he'd woken up in the Barclays’ basement, he'd come up with at least a dozen escape plans and acted on none of them. For one reason, because he was terrified of what they'd do if he tried to escape. (He suspected they wouldn't stray away from using near-fatal methods and just letting them heal.) And for another, he was trying to gather information on the case. He didn't think Scully was still on the case, not after everything that had happened, but if he ever got out, he wanted to have something for her.

All he had so far was confirmation that someone knew that Scully had been taken to the woods. Peter Barclay had told him that someone had come to search the woods a few days after Scully disappeared, and they'd had to hide out in the basement to avoid attention. He was agitated. He told Mulder that if it happened again, they would have to move safe houses, before slamming the door to Mulder's bedroom and locking it. Mulder had slumped on the bed, defeated. He would assume that Scully had sent the FBI agents, but there was really no guarantee. He had no idea how much the task force knew. He had no idea if Scully was okay.

Other than that, the Barclays hadn't said much about the case, especially concerning the daughter that Peter had named as the murderer, the one who'd gone after Scully. They hadn't said much at all, actually. He spent a lot of time in the room they'd lead him to, which he was more than happy to do. He couldn't stand to look at any of them because all he saw was the way they'd hurt Scully, or him. It was hard to be somewhere where the faces in his nightmares were just down the hall. He read a lot if they brought him books. Anything to distract himself. Time seemed to stand still in this place.

Every time he closed his eyes, he saw Scully on the ground, bleeding out. It wasn't something he could forget, especially since he had no idea what had happened to her after he passed out. He'd considered all the options. That Barclay could've been lying and she didn't make it. (He didn't think that one was likely, if only because of the people who searched the woods, but the thought still lingered with him, still terrified him.) That she could've made it out of the woods but still be hurt, that she thought he was dead and would never look for him. She'd seen his throat slit, and she likely wouldn't believe that he'd survived that. He missed her more than he could put into words. He didn't know if he'd ever see her again.

He lay flat on his bed and regarded the ceiling. He tried not to think.

He poked around at the edges of the room and found things. Scraps of paper that were pulpy with old water, where the ink had run and become illegible. Old photos in the drawer of the desk shoved against the wall. He flipped through them and found old black-and-white images of the Barclays going as far back as the 1800’s. The three men he knew, and a woman that looked strangely familiar. They looked exactly the same in every picture.

It wasn't until he saw the spidery labeling on the back of one of the pictures ( _Andrew, Samuel, and Virginia, Christmas Day, 1897_ ) that the pieces clicked together. He knew that face because he'd seen it in case files again and again as he tried to deduce why her body had disappeared. “That's Virginia Barclay,” he said out loud in surprise. The first victim.  _Holy shit,_ he thought to himself in amazement.

He flipped further through the sheath and found another photo that stunned him to his core. It was another face familiar from several photos he'd seen in case files, another face he associated with Scully pale and bloody on the verge of death. Alfred Fellig was sitting shoulder to shoulder with Virginia Barclay, their hands just touching. The caption read  _Virginia with Louis Brady, 1935_. The alias Fellig had been using when he was convicted of murder.

Fellig looked years older than her, but he suspected that wasn't true. He suspected that Virginia Barclay might even be older than Fellig.

Mulder rubbed his forehead a little in amazement. Of all the connections he'd never expected. One full fucking immortality circle. Which, of course, meant that Virginia Barclay had an indirect connection to Scully. He wondered if that was why she was targeted.

He had absolutely no idea if Virginia Barclay had been murdered by her family or if she was the murderer Peter had mentioned. There seemed to be no other daughter in the photos, but he had no idea? How could she be both the murderer and the first victim? Was she someone like Leonard Betts, someone who could heal themselves and march out of the morgue? Had she faked her own death before walking out of the morgue, the way that the mothman Scully shot had? Was that even possible? If the Barclays were really immortal, it seemed likely.

Scully would never believe this.

\---

In August, his theory was confirmed when Virginia Barclay showed up at the house. He heard knocking in his door and he said nothing, made no move to get up from where he was lying flat on the bed, because even after almost three months in the house he had no desire to look at the people who had tried to kill his partner. Who’d tried to kill him, who were keeping him captive there. But the door opened without his permission, just like it always did, and the person on the other side was a surprise.

He sat straight up, from the shock more than any desire to greet this woman standing in front of him. “You're Virginia Barclay,” he said.

The woman who should've been dead offered him a grim smile. “And you're one of the FBI agents who was working my case,” she said, almost cordially.

Mulder had seen the crime scene photos, the gaping wound across Virginia’s throat not unlike the gaping wound that had once severed his own. It was bizarre to see her walking around. He'd checked his own neck a thousand times and found no scar; Virginia’s throat was just as smooth.

She was a murderer. According to Peter Barclay in a heated confrontation they'd had in June, she—his daughter, he'd said, and that had to be Virginia—had been the one who kidnapped Scully. He had no interest in asking her questions about the tree that had likely healed her, why she had done what she did. He fixed her with a level, neutral gaze, said nothing.

“I suppose you don't think very much of me,” Virginia said, flopping lazily in the desk chair. Mulder didn't say anything. “Because I killed those people,” she clarified.

“It might have something to do with that,” Mulder said tightly. “It might also have something to do with the fact that you kidnapped my partner and had your family stab us in front of each other.” The Barclays had clarified that they only attacked him to find out if he tried the Fountain, something that he suspected they'd done lots of times before, so it really was just for their own sick little amusement. It made him sick to his stomach.

She shrugged. “Your care for your partner was endearing. It was a nice coincidence. My father called me to tell me he'd found an FBI agent, because he knew that the FBI were investigating my crimes, and I made the connection. I was watching you, you know; I know what you were looking for.”

Mulder's shoulders tensed. He didn't want to talk about this, how Virginia had stalked them. He asked, “Why did you do it? Your father said you were looking for someone who's immortal, but why those particular people?” He didn't dare reference the fact that she'd been successful with her latest victim. He hoped they'd continue to believe that they'd missed the fatal spot with Scully.

“Isn't it obvious?” Virginia twisted in the chair and opened the drawer where he'd stashed the pictures. “I know you knew Louis,” she said, passing a photo to Mulder. “Or Alfred, I guess. I know you and Scully worked his case.”

Mulder took the photo by the edges, tentatively with the tips of his fingers. “I didn't work the case,” he said. “Scully did, with some guy named Peyton Ritter. I assisted her, but I never met Fellig.”

“Yes, well.” Virginia twisted frizzy curls away from her face and folded her knee up against her ribcage. “All the victims had some connection to one of the aliases Louis used,” she said. “I was waiting for someone to figure it out. Although I knew they wouldn't find me. The genius of faking your own death is that no one actually suspects you.” She grinned cheerfully at Mulder.

He didn't smile back. His stomach was starting to hurt. “But why kill people who were connected to… Louis… to find out if they were immortal? What were you looking for?”

Virginia shrugged. “I told my father that I was doing this because I was bored. It’s nothing that my brothers haven’t done every once in a while, although always in smaller doses,” she said, and the ache in his stomach turned to nausea. “But I'm really doing it because I want to die.”

Mulder blinked, caught off guard. “You wanted to die?” he repeated, dumbfounded. The same way Fellig had wanted to die. He honestly should’ve seen this coming.

She smiled serenely. “Let me tell you a story, Mr. Mulder.” She crossed her arms and leaned back. “My family came to this country as indentured servants in the seventeenth century,” she said. “It becomes hard to remember the year, but I know I was sixteen years old. We were in the third year of our servitude when my mother passed. After that, my father didn't want to stick around and wait for our debt to be paid. My brother Andrew protested out of a sense of duty, but Samuel and I agreed and it was decided. We escaped down south to what is now Florida. And, as I guess you can imagine, we stumbled upon the tree.” She smiled wistfully. “A tree in a hole with  _Fuente de la juventud_  carved into the trunk.”

“And you ate the leaves,” Mulder said.

“At at the time, I couldn’t have told you why we did it. We didn't know what it was,” Virginia said. “Not until a week later, when there was an accident with the axe.”

Mulder winced automatically, remembering the pain of his healing throat. The blood and the terror.

“But we kept taking the leaves after that, once we realized,” she continued. “Immortality didn't seem like a bad idea, especially considering what had happened to our mother, and our younger brothers and sisters who never made it out of childhood. We were all terrified of death, and, like children, we wanted to live forever. Even my father was infected by the excitement. So we built a life out here, shared the tree with those creatures I’m sure you saw out in the woods for hundreds of years. Even as the tunnel system formed, we kept returning. Isolated, we missed most of history, except for the wars. Andrew and Samuel fought in every single war they could. Occasionally, they were fatally wounded and forced to fake their own deaths instead of healing naturally and exposing us. But other than that, we stayed out of sight, avoided contact with others.” She rested her chin in her hands. “Outside of people who found the Fountain, of course.”

Mulder swallowed painfully.

“We didn't want to share our tree, so we hid it,” she said. “Anyone who found the tree, we killed to check if they had partaken of it. Most of them hadn't.” She wolf-grinned. “Until we found Louis in the 1930’s, who had found the tree but didn't use it, and who didn't die the way he was supposed to.”

_Fellig,_  Mulder thought. He'd come to Florida to… what? Look for a way out? Learn the mechanisms of immortality? He, too, Mulder reminded himself, had wanted to die.

"We brought him back here, to the same bedroom my father brought you to,” said Virginia. “And we began asking him questions. He swore up and down that he hadn't eaten the tree, he proved his immortality again and again. He told us that he was looking for a way to die, and he thought that the Fountain might have answers, that if he got used to taking the leaves and then stopped, he thought he might die. He pleaded with us to let him try. He told us the story of the yellow fever, the nurse who took his place in death, and we believed him. What choice did we have? But we couldn't let him leave. So we gave him a job.”

Mulder almost laughed at the absurdity of this part of the story. It sounded insane, absolutely insane. He'd seen the fish company, Andrew had taken him down there. He'd dropped his wallet there, the picture of Scully. It was just one thing after another. Fellig had worked at a fish company?

“He slept here, in this room, and after a few years, his being with us was just a normal part of life.” Virginia took the photograph back from Mulder. “We had an affair,” she said softly, stroking the worn edges with a fingertip. “He told me of his pursuit of Death, trying to find him so he could die the way that nurse had. When he left us, when I helped him escape from my father and brothers, it was so he could continue looking for a way to die.” She rested her chin on her knee. “By then, I had been here for hundreds of years, and I was beginning to grow weary of this earth. I missed my mother, and my lost siblings. So I decided. I kept tabs on Louis, determined to die if he ever found a way to. And he did, earlier this year.”

“But you didn't,” said Mulder.

“No, I didn't. I have tried. He died in January, and that was when I stopped taking the leaves. We always take the leaves every two weeks, to stay young and healthy. I didn't take the leaves at all through March, but I never aged. Any suicide attempts didn't work. I was stuck the way I had been for hundreds of years. The way Louis had been.”

Mulder swallowed against the soreness in his throat, the worry. (She’d stopped taking the leaves and she hadn’t died? What did that mean for him? Was he permanently immortal now, whether he liked it or not? Did one only have to take the leaves once to live forever? Or had Virginia been taken them so long that their effect would never completely leave her?) “S-so where does looking for people who live forever factor in?” he asked, trying to stay focused.

“Louis escaped from Death by giving up someone else. I can only assume that someone took his place in eternal life. I want to find this person and discover how they did it. But I didn't know who was with Louis when he died, so I started with people I thought Louis would want to live forever in his stead. Distant relatives, old friends. The people who he'd been closest to in his recent identities. And when none of those panned out, I did more research. There I found your partner. She'd been wounded at the same time that Louis died, but she survived.” Virginia fixed him with a steely gaze, folding her hands in front of her. “And besides you, your partner was the only one who survived the murder attempts. She seems to have a knack for survival.”

That was one way to put it, but Mulder didn’t like the way she said it, didn’t like the prepositions in the look she was giving him. He couldn’t let them hurt Scully. He swallowed again, nervous. “It was a fluke,” he said for what must've been the thousandth time. “Scully almost died, that time she got shot, and she almost died again in the woods. It's a miracle she's still alive.”

“Yes,” Virginia said gravely. “A miracle.” She leaned towards Mulder, looking him dead in the eye. “Tell me. What happened in that room, when Louis Brady died and your partner was shot?”

He spoke quickly, so it didn't seem like he was hesitating. “From what I understand,” he said, “Scully was in the room talking to Fellig. Peyton Ritter, the other agent on the case, entered the room and thought he saw a gun on Fellig, so he shot him. The bullet went through Fellig and into Scully. She almost bled out. She is not immortal.”

Virginia looked him dead in the eye and nodded. She stood and exited the room without another word. Mulder lay back on the bed, overwhelmed with all the information that had engulfed him like a wave. He didn't know if Scully was okay, if she was alive, if she was looking for him. He didn't even know if she was immortal. But everything he'd seen suggested that she was.

\---

The Barclays became more comfortable with him as time went on. They let him walk around the house, which he rarely did because he hated to be around them. Virginia was already lingering, silent and sneaky like a cat. He hated to look at them.

At the end of September, Virginia disappeared from the house. At the beginning of October, Peter Barclay got a call that made him furious. Virginia had killed someone else, he said. They had to move houses, he said, lest they risk being found. If Scully remembered their faces, then she might send someone looking for them, and they couldn’t keep avoiding the police on luck alone. That was exactly what Mulder had been hoping for, that Scully would send someone to the woods, but he didn't think she would be able to find the house based off of an interlude in the woods that was possibly miles and miles away from where they were. That didn't matter to the Barclays. They had a spare house further in the woods, and they were going to move to it no matter what anyone else said.

In the midst of all the chaos, being more or less forced to help the Barclays move, Mulder learned that the victim was Peyton Ritter, who had inexplicably survived and therefore would likely be able to identify Virginia Barclay. Some sort of unspeakable guilt bubbled up in his throat. He had been trying to protect Scully, but he'd never meant to implicate Ritter. Never meant to put anyone else in danger. Not even someone who shot his partner. He would never wish the Barclays on anyone.

So now the case was reopened. It seemed crazy, but he wondered if anyone would make the Fellig connection, since that was the link between Scully and Ritter. He wondered if Scully would come back on the case. He wondered if she’d look for him.

\---

A few days after the initial move to the new (smaller) safe house, Peter went back to the old house to clear some last things out. Mulder waited on the floor of his new bedroom (a phrase he absolutely hated), tense and ready on the floor. The brothers were distracted trying to set up everything up downstairs; if there was any point in time where he could escape, it was now, while the FBI was on alert in Tallahassee and the Barclays were distracted with trying to hide. If he could get to town, find Skinner or Kersh or even that guy Kravert (or Scully, if he was thinking wishfully), the Barclays wouldn’t be able to touch him. As soon as he heard the furniture scraping across the floor, he moved, creeping out of his room and quietly down the stairs.

The brothers had left the keys to their car down on the counter. Mulder scooped them up carefully, wrapping his fingers around them so they wouldn’t jangle. If he could just get into the car, he could get away; they wouldn't be able to catch him if he drove fast enough. His heart was pounding with the possibilities; if this worked, he would be in Tallahassee within the hour. He'd be free; he'd be able to implicate Virginia Barclay, if anyone would believe him. He'd be able to find out if Scully was okay, maybe even see her again. He slowly walked into the hall.

He didn't know the floorboards in this new hallway, so there was more chance for him to mess up and alert them to his presence. He swore under his breath as his foot hit a squeaky board; the creaking sound seemed to echo. But there was no responding footsteps, no sounds of angry Barclay brothers. And then he heard something: familiar, angry voices.

Mulder drew closer, breathing in and out shallowly. The sound was coming from behind a nearby door; he went to it and looked through the crack.

Samuel and Andrew were huddled around a phone on speakerphone. “I don't know what you're talking about,” said Samuel.

“You fucking liar!” The voice was shockingly familiar, and it stunned him to the bone. It was Scully. Scully was on the other end, and she sounded furious, scared, sad, stuffy like she’d been crying or had a bloody nose. She sounded vengeful and familiar, and the sound of her voice was like a life raft to Mulder. His heart stilled in his chest. “Tell me what you did to him!” Scully insisted.

A lump welled up in Mulder's throat. Scully had looked for him; she was on the other end of the phone, all he had to do was go in there and say something. A muttering sound on the other end. “Where is he?” Scully demanded, and Mulder pushed through the door on instinct. Andrew and Samuel didn't turn, huddled around the phone.

“Where is he? Where's Mulder?” Scully was pleading on the other end, and her voice cut him to the core.

He pushed through the walls of Andrew and Samuel’s arms and grabbed for the phone. They scrambled to pull him back, but he clutched it hard. “Scully?” he said into the phone with disbelief.

\---

Seeing her again didn't feel real. After six months, he couldn't quite believe it. It was the longest he'd gone without seeing her since 1993. As many times as he'd reassured himself that she was alive, she'd made it, he had never quite believed it. Seeing her again was like an adrenaline shot. He couldn't breathe for a moment, numb fingers pressed together in his lap. Her hair was shorter, just a bit. Her nose was bruised and puffy, like someone had hit her there. When they were both out of the cars and walking slowly towards each other, he didn't look away. She held his gaze, looking back at him tremulously, her demeanor radiating strength but her eyes full of emotion. He'd missed her more than he could ever put into words.

The exchange went over badly, as he’d guessed it would; he knew the Barclays too well now. He tackled Scully to the ground as gunshots exploded around them. She gripped his hand in hers and pulled him into the woods. Scully was there, Scully was his anchor, his touchstone; she tethered him to Earth.

\---

**_october, 1999_ **

Mulder told her everything—the Barclays, the tree, Virginia and Fellig—while holding her hand in the cave in the woods. His palm was sticky with sweat, his wrist lined with rope burns. She didn't believe him. Or she wouldn't believe him if it weren't for everything that had happened in the last six months. He was  _alive_ , and so was Virginia Barclay. She could believe some of it, considering the things she'd found.

“I figured out that Fellig was with the Barclays in the 1930’s,” she said, stroking the back of his hand with her thumb. She didn't know if she'd ever be able to stop touching him. “I didn't know it was the same Barclays… but I thought it was a lead worth pursuing, considering what happened in these woods. I hoped I would find you out here.” She blinked hard, reached into her front pocket for the folded photo and handed it to him with her free hand. “I found this in the fish company,” she said. “In your wallet. That's how I knew you'd been here.”

Mulder nudged the photo open with one finger, pulled their joined hands towards him and held the tangle of knuckles against his cheek. “I thought I'd lost this,” he said softly, letting her hand go. “It's been a long six months, Scully.”

“I know,” she whispered. “I'm so sorry. I should've thought to search the woods.”

“Scully, you couldn't have known,” he said. They were still sitting too close, their knees touching. He reached out and pushed hair behind her ear. “The woods are huge, there's no way you could've…”

“I should've thought of it,” she said stubbornly. He leaned forward until their foreheads were touching. “You spent all that time there… I should have come for you sooner, even after the leads dried up,” she added firmly, scolding herself.

He shook his head against hers. She closed her eyes. He was real and warm and there, with her. She wrapped her arms around his neck, pulling him closer. “Mulder, I'm so sorry,” she whispered.

“They would've gone after me anyway,” Mulder said roughly. “It had nothing to do with you. It was because I found the tree. If I hadn't gone looking for it, they never would've tried to kill me. If I'd been with you, maybe I could've protected you… kept her from… ”

“I can't believe you did that for me,” Scully whispered. “Looked for that. Because you didn't want me to be alone.”

Their noses brushed together as she leaned forward, their mouths meeting hotly. Mulder made a small sound of surprise, tilted his head and let his mouth fall open. Her fingers brushed over his cheek, his hand cupped the back of her head. When she pulled away, he took a shuddering breath. They sat together in silence, foreheads pressed together, in the darkness of the cave.

\---

Eventually, Mulder nudged her to her feet. “We have to get going,” he murmured into her hair. “The Barclays know these woods, and they use the tunnels constantly. If we wait til daylight, we'll have made their jobs easier.”

Scully got to her feet, somewhat reluctantly. “I left my phone in the car,” she told him regretfully, helping him to his feet. “Off. I didn't want Skinner trying to call and telling me not to come.”

“You didn't tell anyone you were coming out here?” Mulder asked with some surprise.

“I told him I was coming,” she said lightly. “I just didn't want him calling to try and talk me out of it.”

She could feel Mulder's eyes on her, and she said, “You've done much more reckless things, Mulder. It doesn't matter. We're both fine.”  _Really, miraculously fine._

“I know,” he said quietly, his fingers brushing against the inside of her wrist. She shivered a little, walking into the circle of moonlight that the hole left on the floor. It was partially hidden with a tangle of weeds and vines, and it was at least several feet taller than Mulder. She crossed her arms, surveying it. There were no annoying Florida-native agents to help them out this time, unfortunately. “How are we getting out of here?” she asked, and he gave her a helpless look that gave her absolutely no hope for their escape.

He ended up boosting her up and she reached down and helped him out, his feet scuffing the side of the dirt wall as he climbed. The muscles of her arms strained with his weight but they both managed to crawl out of the hole and land side by side on the ground, panting with exertion. For a moment, Scully forgot herself: it was just another case where she was exhausted and dirty and Mulder was beside her. And then she remembered, and almost smiled.

“Come on,” Mulder whispered gently, sliding his fingers through hers. They weren't out of danger yet.

Scully nodded, shaking hair thick with sweat and dirt out of her face, and got to her feet. They walked into the woods together, out into the vast, dark mass of trees.

\---

“I just wanted to tell you,” said Mulder hours, “that I never meant for Virginia Barclay to go after Ritter. I wasn't trying… I was just trying to keep them from going after you again. I didn’t tell them to attack Ritter instead.”

Scully swallowed against the lump in her throat. They were walking through the trees tensely, jumping at every sound, the way they’d been doing for hours. The night was beginning to fade; it would be light in a few hours, and then it’d be even easier to find them, especially for people who’d been in the woods for hundreds of years. “I know you wouldn’t send them after Ritter, Mulder,” she said. “Of course I know that.”

“I hate what he did to you, but I would never…” The words faded out. She turned to look at him and found him looking pale and fearful in the moonlight. “I just didn’t want them to hurt you anymore,” he said roughly.

Splashes of Mulder’s blood under the moonlight. She wanted to wrap her arms around him. “I know,” she said. “I know, Mulder. I feel the same way.”

“I didn’t know if you were… okay,” he said. “All I knew was that they told me you disappeared, but I didn’t know… I didn’t know if you were looking for me…”

She immediately turned towards him in shock, maybe a little bit in hurt. After everything they’d been through, all the times she hadn’t given up, the idea was like being doused with ice-cold water. “You didn’t think I would look for you?” she said softly.

His mouth opened, but no sound came out; he began to speak, but a gunshot exploded behind them. Scully grabbed Mulder on instinct, pushed him behind a tree and grabbed her gun. Mulder was breathing shakily, clearly panicked; another gunshot, and he tried to push himself in front of Scully. She pushed back, shoved at his shoulder and motioned him to another tree. They dodged the space between the trunks and ducked behind it. She checked to make sure her gun was loaded and poised it in front of her. Mulder was standing behind her, and she could feel his heartbeat against her back, his too-thin ribs against her spine. “Stay behind me,” she whispered sternly. “You don’t have your weapon.”

“Scully,” he hissed from behind her, a protest, and then a warning. “Scully, he sees us.”

She pushed against him with her back, shoving him around the tree trunk, and located the man. It looked like one of the brothers. She ducked as a bullet took off a chunk of bark above her head. Mulder grabbed a handful of her shirt in alarm. Scully aimed and fired.

It hit the man somewhere in his torso, knocking him on his back. Scully held her gun out in front of her as she approached him; her instincts was right, he was already aiming again. Mulder moved in from the other side and yanked the gun out of his hand, a look of disgust on his face. “Don’t fucking think about it,” he snapped.

Scully leaned closer and saw the small hole in his chest, blood dripping down the front of his shirt. “We need to call an ambulance,” she said.

“No, we don’t. Remember what I said, Scully? He’s going to heal,” Mulder said, nudging her shoulder. “We need to get out of here.”

The man laughed wetly, reached out and grabbed at Scully’s ankle. She jolted away. “Stay the hell away from her,” Mulder snapped at the man, glaring down at him. He said to Scully, “We don’t have anything to call with, remember? His car is around here, I’ll bet, he took his car keys from me earlier…” He reached down and took a pair of keys from the man’s pocket, clicked the blinker. The car chirped from somewhere nearby.

“We should take him with us,”  Scully said. “He’s a murderer.”

“If you think I’m going quietly, you’re insane,” said the man, a trickle of blood dripping from his mouth.

Scully saw a flash of silver in his hand, and a sudden stinging pain on her ankle. She hissed, stumbling away. Looking down, she saw a very small blade in the man’s hand, the equally small cut he’d made near the top of her foot. It looked like she had cut herself shaving.

Fury flashed in Mulder’s eyes. “Let’s go,” he said tightly, kicking the knife out of the man’s hand. “We’ll bring someone back here. I just want to get out of here.”

Scully hated to leave a suspect behind, but she felt like she could make an exception. She kept her gun on the man as they went to the car. As soon as they got to the car, Mulder wordlessly passed her the keys. She took them and kept the gun on him as Mulder climbed into the car. And then she got in herself.

As the car sped away, Scully could feel herself relaxing. They were doing it, finally getting out of danger. She was going to get Mulder to safety.

“Scully,” Mulder said softly, his fingertips brushing over the top of her hand.

She swallowed back her hurt that he'd thought she wouldn't look for him. (Was it because of the things she'd said before he disappeared? Was it because of the coldness between them during the first part of this year? Did he really think so little of her that he'd believe she wouldn't look? That she didn't care?)  _He's alive,_  she told herself. _He's alive, and he’s safe, and that's all that matters. He’s been through hell, and you cannot start a fight again. Just be grateful you have him back._

“We're okay, Mulder,” she said quietly. “We're getting out of here. We'll be okay.”

Mulder was watching her carefully. “That's good,” he said, just as quietly.

His fingers brushed over her hand again as he stretched out in the seat. Scully listened to his breathing as he dozed off, her eyes on the road. They drove in silence.


	10. Chapter 10

**chapter ten  
**

**_may, 1999_ **

Scully woke slowly, as if surfacing from underwater. The smell of saline, the feeling of an IV, the beeping of the heart monitor. The itching of bandages along her torso. Her hands flat on the mattress, cold. And then she remembered and panicked, her fingers digging into the mattress as she struggled to sit up, as her mouth fell open to demand to know where he was.

There was a gap in her memory after that. Cool, white space in her mind, like hospital sheets. Her throat was raw from shouting. She asked one of the nurses what happened when she was brought ice chips, and the nurse told her that she'd been frantic when she woke up, asking for her partner. Her partner who wasn't there. Scully swallowed back nausea, nodded with her jaw clenched to hide the fact that she was about two inches away from crying. When the nurse left, she wiped her eyes with the edge of the sheets and buried her face in the side side of the pillow.

Her brother appeared at her bedside later, his face familiarly pale and worried. “Bill,” Scully rasped guiltily, tears stinging her eyes. It had been less than a week since her mother's car accident, and now her son had to come down to Florida because her daughter was in the hospital again. It was becoming a practically normal occurrence. “You didn't have to come,” she whispered as Bill took her hand.

“Of course I did, Danes,” Bill said, with his own hint of guilt in his voice. He squeezed her hand before letting go and sitting down beside her bed. “Mom sends her love. It took a lot to get her to stay home; she's really worried about you.”

Scully wiped tears from her eyes. “She's doing okay?” she whispered.

“She's doing fine.” Bill folded his hands, in a formal way that reminded Scully of her father delivering bad news and said in a grave tone, “I'm so sorry about your partner, Dana.”

It hit her like a truck, the fact that Mulder hadn’t made it. It never stopped being shocking, no matter how many times she told herself it was true. Scully let herself lie back limply on the mattress, blinking back more tears. “Thank you, Bill,” she said thickly.

Bill squeezed her hand again before letting it go. “I'm so glad you're okay, Danes,” he said softly. “This happens to you way too much.”

Scully slipped her hand under the sheet, touching the bandages along her side.  “I know,” she said to the ceiling.

Mulder was always by her bedside when she woke up in the hospital. She'd known something was wrong as soon as she'd woken up and he wasn't there. She pushed hair behind her ears, tried to breathe deeply. Usually, these things didn't happen to both of them at once. Usually, both of them came out okay.

\---

She didn't ask anyone what they knew about Mulder until Skinner came to visit. She wanted a straight answer, no one dancing around things to spare her feelings. She was terrified about what she'd learn—that Mulder was dead, that his body was lying in the morgue on a cold slab with a gaping wound in his throat—but she had to know. She had to know.

Skinner came in the afternoon the day after she woke up, when Scully was poking at a plastic cup of green Jello with no interest. “Agent Scully,” he said when he appeared in the doorway to her room. “How are you feeling?”

She pushed the cup aside, sitting up in bed. “What did you find, out in those woods?” she croaked sternly.

Skinner squirmed uncomfortably.  “We found the crime scene and searched the surrounding area,” he said. “We don't have the resources to search the whole forest, I'm afraid…”

“What did you find about Mulder?” she snapped.

Skinner rubbed the back of his neck uncomfortably. “We haven't found Mulder's body,” he said, and Scully's body sagged with an incredible amount of relief. “We found both yours and Mulder's blood type at the scene, excess amounts that would suggest that Mulder is as severely injured as you are, if not…” Skinner gave her a sympathetic look. “Scully, I just want to prepare you for what we might find.”

“I  _know_ what you might find,” she snapped. They'd taken her witness statement the day before; she'd told them everything that they'd seen, her voice not trembling a bit, her hands clutching the blanket hard. “I was there.”

Skinner was giving her a fatherly look, his own sorrow written across his face. “I know,” he said. “I'm sorry.”

She looked down at her lap uncomfortably. She just wanted to see Mulder. She'd had nightmares the night before, blood and flashing metal and Mulder's dark, pleading eyes. She'd gone over it again and again since she woke up, and she couldn't figure out why the two of them had been targeted. But she did know this: if she hadn't kicked him out of her motel room, if she'd gone with him to the forest or made him stay with her, one of them probably would've seen the kidnappers, been able to save each other. They were a team, and she had betrayed that because she was angry at him for looking for the fucking Fountain of Youth.

And then a spark in her mind: he'd been looking for the Fountain of Youth. What if he had found it? What if he'd been able to survive the wounds? Or what if blood loss had made her hallucinate and she'd seen things wrong, what if they'd given Mulder a less fatal wound then a slit throat? Whatever the reason, one thing seemed clear: she couldn't just accept the fact that he was dead. And if there was even the slightest possibility that he was alive…

They hadn't found a body. And besides that, she would know if he was dead, wouldn't she? She would know. And it didn't feel real, none of it, and oh god, she had to find him. Dead or alive, she had to find him.

“Mulder has looked for me every time I've disappeared,” she said to her knees. “And he found me every single time. And if he didn't find me, he didn't give up. He kept looking.”

“Yes,” said Skinner uncertainly. “Yes, he has. He did."

He'd always been there for her, always. She wasn't going to give up on him. She couldn't. “Then I'm going to find him,” she said, looking up at Skinner, dead serious. “He's my partner, and I'm not giving up on him. And if I can't find…” She swallowed back the lump in her throat. “If I can't find him, then I can find the people who attacked us. And I can bring them to justice.”

Skinner had a knowing look on his face now. “I didn't expect you to do anything differently,” he said.

\---

**_october, 1999_ **

They went straight to Scully's motel room. Scully wanted to take Mulder to a hospital, but he refused. They were both exhausted, and he hadn't slept peacefully in months. They agreed to go see Kravert and Skinner at the Bureau as soon as they both woke up. Mulder offered to get his own room, but Scully immediately shook her head. “I'm not leaving you alone,” she said. “It's fine. We can just share the bed.”

He didn't mind that proposition at all, but it had been awkward between them since they left the woods. Since he'd said he thought she wouldn't look for him. He needed to apologize for that. There were so, so many things he needed to apologize for, and he couldn't believe she was really there. Her presence was still so incredible to him.

He nodded his agreement silently. She offered him a small smile before turning and leading him into her room.

It was a different motel from the last time they'd been in Tallahassee, which he was more than relieved about. He'd spent way too much time reliving their last phone call, picturing Scully being attacked, reliving the fight they had just before he left. This motel room had one bed with a really ugly bedspread. The bed was still made, there was still a plastic container with little pools of salad dressing in the bottom on the desk. “Make yourself at home,” Scully said, setting her gun down on the bedside table. “I imagine you'll want a shower, I, uh… I have one of your t-shirts but none of your other clothes…” She unzipped her suitcase and pulled out a folded-up t-shirt. The Quantico t-shirt she'd worn the night after Padgett.

He swallowed and took the shirt from her. It probably smelled like her after all these months of her having it. “Thanks, Scully,” he said gratefully.

“Of course.” She looked down at the ground awkwardly.

He set the shirt down on the bed and stepped closer to Scully, reaching out to touch her shoulder. “Scully, I'm sorry,” he said.

Her shoulders hunched up, her arms clenched at her side. “For what, Mulder?” she mumbled. “You didn't do anything wrong.”

“I'm sorry for underestimating you.”

She looked up at him, her eyes full of emotion that he didn't often see. Scully was so good at putting up walls, but she so rarely let them down. “Mulder, you don't have to…” she started.

“I thought you'd think I was dead,” he said, and she flinched. He brushed the side of her face in an attempt to comfort her. “I  _should_ be dead,” he said softly. “I didn't think you'd believe…”

“I was in denial,” Scully said softly. “I told myself again and again that maybe I saw it wrong. But I was terrified you  _were_ dead. I was terrified that I had seen it right, and your throat had been slit.” She gestured to his neck again, the lack of a scar.

He wasn't going to argue whether or not his throat really had been cut, not now. He took her hand, intertwining their fingers. “I didn't think you'd believe it,” he whispered. “I shouldn't have underestimated you. I'm so sorry. I can't believe you looked for me all this time. I'm so grateful that you…”

Scully's eyes shifted back to the ground. “It's what you would've done for me,” she said. “And I couldn't… I didn’t want to accept that you were gone.”

Overwhelmed, he wrapped his arms around her, pressing his nose into her hair. She hugged him back tightly, her face buried in his chest. “I tried to keep the X-Files going,” she mumbled. “I'm no good at it, Mulder. They made a big mistake assigning me to you.”

He huffed out a laugh into her hair. “It was a mistake, but they screwed themselves, Scully, not me,” he said. “Your assignment was the best thing that's ever happened to me.”

She laughed wetly into his shirt and he kissed the top of her head. “And I need to apologize,” he said.

“Mulder, I told you, you don't have to do that.”

“No, I do.” He pulled back to look her in the eye. “When you said you didn't want to be alone… I wanted to make sure that didn't happened. I thought if I found the… the fucking Fountain of Youth…” He chuckled self-deprecatingly. “... I thought you could have the option if there was someone you wanted to… if I was… I don't know. But I should have talked to you first. I  _meant_ to talk to you first. But then we fought, and I went to find it because I didn't know what else to do, and I shouldn't have… It all just happened so fast.”

Scully reached up to cup his face. She was looking up at him, smiling shakily. “Mulder, it's okay,” she said. “It's okay.”

He kissed her this time, something he'd been wanting to do since last summer. For years, if he was being honest. Her lips were cold, but she surged against him, wrapping herself around him, her fingers slipping on the front of his shirt. He'd missed her. He'd missed her so, so much, but they were both there. They were both there.

\---

They slept tangled up in the sheets and each other. It was the best that Mulder had slept in months, Scully curled into his side with a shirt she'd thrown on before they went to sleep hanging to her knees, his arms slung down over her ribs and his chin nudging the top of her head. No worry of death or dying, at least not yet. Scully had her gun on her bedside table, and Mulder had Samuel’s gun from that last struggle in the woods on his bedside table. He felt relaxed for the first time in months.

Sometime in the middle of the night, Scully muttered something that might’ve been his name, curling hard into him with her arm wrapped around his bare chest. He smiled, gathering her up and closing his eyes.  _We'll be okay,_ Scully had said in the car, but this was the first time he really believed it.

\---

When he woke up, it was mid-morning, light streaming in through the windows. The shower was running in the other room—the source of Scully's absence, he assumed. He got out of bed, rubbing his mouth as he padded across the room, and pulled on the Quantico shirt and the dirty pants from the day before.

It was strange, not sitting by the door and listening for the footsteps of the Barclays, not pacing anxiously around the too-small room and wishing he was anywhere else, trying to plot an escape. At least the motel room were slightly bigger than his old bedroom. For a brief moment, he was eager to get back to Alexandria, back to his apartment, and then he realized that he probably didn't have an apartment anymore, after six months. He scrubbed a hand through his hair and sighed, wondered if anyone had taken the fish.

His hair was overlong from months of not getting a haircut. He was skinnier, his ribs more visible underneath his clothes. His reflection in the mirror looked haggard, unhealthy. He swallowed, pulling at the t-shirt. (It did smell like Scully.) He didn't look anything like an FBI agent. He looked like a victim.

The shower turned off in the bathroom, and Mulder turned away from the mirror, sitting on the edge of the bed. “Hey, Scully?” he called out carefully, trying not to startle her.

“Yeah?”

“I'm going to run to the lobby and get some food,” he said. “You want anything?”

“Bring me a bagel?” she asked.

“Sure.” He stood and walked to the door. “Be right back,” he called, shutting it behind him.

He gathered food from the continental breakfast in the lobby and headed back to the room. Scully was sitting on the edge of her bed, already dressed, hair in wet waves around her cheek. He thought about kissing her. “Hey,” he said instead, handing her the bagel.

She smiled at him brightly, taking the bagel. “Hi.”

He kissed her on the forehead as he sat down beside her, a strangely intimate gesture that he couldn't explain why he did but that he also couldn't keep from doing. “So what's the plan?” he asked.

“I'm calling Kravert and asking him to meet us here,” she said. “I don't want to drive that man's car more than we have to.”

“Samuel,” Mulder supplied, a bit bitterly.

“Samuel,” Scully repeated, a smidge of fury in her voice. “He's really going to heal? And the other one I shot?”

“Andrew,” said Mulder. “Yes, they will. I've never seen them do it, but they used the same thing I did for years and years. Chewed the leaves from the tree.”

“It felt strange to just leave him there,” Scully admitted, fiddling with her cross necklace. “But we need to go back and arrest them. And Virginia… Jesus, there's no way Kravert will believe me about Virginia. Maybe Skinner… You saw her, right? She stayed at the house with you? Do you know where she went?”

“All I know is that she went for Ritter,” Mulder said. His eyes drifted to the window; he saw something flicker at the window. “Scully, do you see something?” he whispered.

“What?” She turned, startled, towards his line of sight.

A shadow flickered across the floor. A very human-looking shadow.

“Scully, get the gun,” Mulder whispered.

Something busted through the window, shattering it on impact. Mulder scrambled to his feet, rushing to the window, and met Samuel Barclay head-on. He hit him directly in the place where the bullet had hit the night before; the other man yowled, tumbling back out of the window. But someone else was right behind him. Peter Barclay toppled through the window and stumbled to his feet, balled a fist in Mulder's t-shirt and shoved him backwards into the wall to the left. “Scully!” Mulder shouted, a warning, as he pushed at Peter’s shoulder in an attempt to get him away. Peter slammed him against the wall, and Mulder saw stars for a moment.

From over Peter’s shoulder, he saw Andrew tumble in through the window, gun aimed. “FBI, drop your weapon!” Scully shouted.

Peter lifted the gun in his own hand to Mulder's head, and Mulder scratched him hard in an attempt to get him to drop it. “Drop  _your_ weapon, agent!” Andrew was shouting. “We have you outnumbered!”

Mulder dug his fingernails into Peter’s hand, hard enough to draw blood, but it did nothing. The muzzle of the gun kept moving, brushed the side of his head, and his vision went briefly red. He jerked his head forward, banging foreheads with Peter so hard that his skull seemed to throb with pain, in protest for the abuse it had suffered over the last few minutes. They groaned simultaneously, and Mulder used the opportunity to shove Peter forward. He crashed into Andrew, knocking them both to the ground. The gun in Andrew’s hand fired. Far away, Mulder heard someone scream.

He dropped to his knees, ignoring the glass digging in, ignoring the throbbing of his head, and grabbed Andrew’s gun while the man was dazed. “Scully, you okay?” he shouted, aiming the gun at the two men.

“Fine,” Scully called, and he exhaled in relief. “Keep the gun on them.”

Out of the corner of his eyes, he watched Scully cross the room, kicking Peter's gun across the room. A rustling sound at the window, and then Scully's stern voice: “FBI, hands in the air! Get in the window slowly.”

Andrew was not dazed anymore; he tried to strike out at Mulder, and Mulder stumbled backwards to his feet, keeping the gun aimed. “Move and I'll shoot you,” he said. “And even though you'll heal… I know it has to hurt like hell.”

Scully pinned Samuel to the wall, gun to his head. “Mulder, we have to get them out of here somehow,” she said pointedly. “I left my handcuffs in my car.”

Mulder clutched the gun harder, his mind racing. They had to restrain them somehow, but they were outnumbered in a way that would make it hard to leave either of them to find something. He was already worried about holding both Peter and Andrew at gunpoint. His eyes darted nervously towards Scully, nervously back to the men as he saw Peter start to stir, start to turn towards him. And then the door fell in with a hard kick.

Mulder jolted, gun wobbling in his hands. He couldn't look; he kept his focus on the Barclays. He briefly prayed it wasn't Virginia.

“Agent Mulder?” said a surprised voice, one that was familiar but Mulder had absolutely no idea why he thought so.

“Agent Kravert,” Scully said wearily from behind him. “A little help here, please? These are the men who tried to murder us.”

\---

The Barclays were arrested, at the very least on charges of property damages. At the most, on Mulder and Scully's matching identifications as the men who stabbed Scully, and Mulder's testified six-month captivity. Kravert wanted to charge them with the other murders and the attack on Ritter as well, but Mulder insisted that they weren't the killers, and Scully actually backed him. “You could call them accomplices, but they didn't have a hand in any of the deaths that took place before our attack,” Mulder told Kravert and Skinner. “I met the murderer, I talked to her. It's Virginia Barclay. Somehow, she's still alive.”

Kravert looked like Mulder had suggested that Bigfoot was the killer. Skinner sighed, lifting his glasses and rubbing at his eyes, said, “Are you absolutely sure, Agent?”

He was surprised; he'd expected more resistance from Skinner, but maybe the man didn't want to downplay their reunion by immediately disagreeing with him. He said, “Positive, sir. I talked to her. She was the woman from the crime scene photos. She faked her death somehow and walked out of the morgue. That's why her body was the only one that disappeared.”

“An autopsy would've confirmed that she was still alive, so it makes sense that she would want to avoid one,” Scully put in.

“That is… highly improbable, Scully,” said Kravert, clearly dumbfounded.

“It's the truth,” Mulder said simply. He was more than done with playing around.

Skinner was still rubbing at his forehead like he had a headache. (Mulder knew the feeling.) “Do you have any idea where she might’ve gone?” he asked.

“No,” said Mulder, shaking his head. “All I know is that she went after Ritter because his connection to Fellig and Scully. I don't know where she went afterwards.”

Skinner turned to Kravert. “Put out an APB on Virginia Barclay,” he said. “Use the photos from the case files, since that's what Mulder recognized her from.”

Kravert looked between the three of them, and only encountering complete seriousness, he sighed. “Yes, sir,” he said, turning and jogging away.

Skinner turned back towards where Mulder and Scully were standing side by side. “Agent Scully,” he said sternly. “Going after Agent Mulder without backup was incredibly irresponsible.”

“Yes, sir,” Scully said bluntly. Her jaw was set, a neutral look on her face. No regrets. God, he loved her.

Skinner sighed again, adjusted his glasses before reaching out to touch Mulder's shoulder. “Mulder, I am incredibly relieved that you are okay,” he told him sincerely.

“Thank you, sir,” said Mulder. He'd surprisingly missed Skinner in those six months, even more than he had during the months under Kersh. After everything, he had a certain amount of appreciation for the man, who'd more than proved where his loyalties laid.

Skinner squeezed his shoulder before letting go. “The motel has provided you with new rooms,” he intoned. “Get some rest, agents. We've got it from here.”

They nodded, turned away as Skinner walked off. Mulder leaned close to Scully as he whispered, “Notice he didn't mention anything about Virginia Barclay coming back for us.”

“I think a begrudging APB is about the best we're going to get out of this situation, Mulder,” Scully said. “Seeing as how Virginia Barclay was declared dead eight months ago.”

“Scully, I'll remind you that the X-Files have had much more dead culprits than Virginia Barclay,” Mulder replied.

“It doesn't matter,” Scully said as they went to the front office. “We'll both be on alert in case Virginia comes back. But we've more than paid our dues on this case, and it's not our job to look for Virginia Barclay.”

Mulder swallowed as they pushed the door open. “Unless she decides to come back for you,” he said quietly.

Scully looked up at him, her eyes full of wordless affirmations. “She won't,” she said firmly. “And even if she does, I won't be alone.”

Mulder nodded, brushed his fingers along the inside of her arm. “No, you won't,” he said.

They asked the front desk for one room.

\---

They ended up spending the day watching TV on the bed. They ordered in room service, and Mulder ate ravenously. They sat with their arms touching, extra pillows piled up at their back. They didn't kiss. They touched a little more than necessary, but then again, that was their usual M.O., if only six months stale. Mulder's heart still beat a little too fast with Scully this close to him, the reaction of a teenager. Neither of them brought up the night before. They both jumped violently at any sudden sounds from the other room.

Sometime after it got dark, Scully fell asleep curled against his shoulder. He smiled affectionately, brushed hair off of her face and tucked the thin motel quilt around her shoulders. He was exhausted, too, and was about to turn off the TV (because he knew it bothered Scully) and go to sleep when the phone rang.

The motel phone, on the bedside table. Mulder wondered if the front desk had been instructed to call and check on them as he fumbled to answer before the ringing phone woke Scully up. He shoved the phone beneath his ear and said, “Hello?”

“Mr. Mulder?” said a voice that made Mulder's blood freeze in his veins, that made him want to throw off the covers and run, make sure he was still safe and free to leave whenever he wanted. God, he'd thought this was over. “Mr. Mulder, it's Peter Barclay.”

“Where the hell are you calling from and what the hell did you want?” Mulder snapped viciously, sitting straight up in bed. His hands were trembling. This was supposed to be over.

Scully was starting to stir beside him, rolling over in the empty space where he'd been lying down, her nose against his knee.

“Calm down, Mr. Mulder. I'm calling from a holding cell,” Barclay said. “You're my ‘lawyer’.”

Scully rolled onto her back, blinking owlishly up at him. Mulder clutched the phone hard and said, “So what the fuck do you want?”

“I want you to stop my daughter, Mr. Mulder,” Barclay said. “I know what she wants now. I didn't know before, but I understand now. The day I've dreaded for centuries has come.”

“I don't know what you mean,” he growled. Scully rose up on one elbow and mouthed,  _Barclay?_  He nodded tensely. “But I don't want to listen to it,” he said, and reached to cut it off.

“I know that Virginia wants to die,” said Peter before he could. “And I know what she will do next. She'll either go after your partner or the other man she tried to kill, the only ones who survived her attempts.”

_And they're the only ones who were there when Fellig died,_ Mulder thought regrettably, fingers clenching around the receiver.

“Don't listen to him,” Scully said, sitting up in bed. “It doesn't matter. We're fine.”

Peter was talking over her, two voices echoing in Mulder's ears. “If she figures out how to die, then she will die,” he said. “And I don't want this. And if she fails, then your partner will be in danger of dying, and I know you don't want that. Please, Mr. Mulder, stop this from hap—”

Scully took the phone from him and hung up. “Mulder, you don't have to listen to what he says,” she said. “We're prepared for if Virginia comes, and even if she does…” She bit her lower lip, the blue light of the television flickering off of her face. “Well, if you really think I'm immortal, then it's not a problem,” she added softly.

“I don't want to see you hurt again,” he said in a rush. “But all of that aside… Scully, Peyton Ritter isn't immortal. If she goes after him, he's got no protection, especially if he's still in the hospital.”

Scully's eyes widened slightly. “She's going to go after him,” she said. “We have to help him.”


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warning for violence and a murder attempt

**chapter eleven**

**_october, 1999_ **

The hospital was surprisingly quiet, even for the middle of the night. Most of the nurses were dispatched to someone who was crashing down the hall, and the hallways were lonely and shadowy. Scully walked through the corridor, shoes clicking loudly on the linoleum, heart pounding in her chest. She was assumedly about to confront a woman that she didn't know, outside of files and that one time she'd apparently been hit from behind by her. She couldn't believe she was doing this for Ritter, a man who'd shot her and patronized her repeatedly. They should've just called it in; Mulder had wanted to call it in. But Scully had refused. Somehow, she needed some sort of closure on this all: to know that Virginia Barclay was really the killer, to see her arrested. Not that she didn't believe Mulder, but it just seemed too far-fetched, after everything. She needed to see for herself.

Mulder was at her side, and he reached down to brush her elbow as they walked. Scully actually almost smiled; it was absurd, considering the situation they were about to walk into, but she was relieved that he was here with her, that she had a partner again. “Are you ready?” she asked softly as they reached Ritter's room, and he nodded.

Through the window in Ritter's door, Scully saw something, a flicker of long, dark hair. She nudged Mulder and they moved forward at the same time. She pulled out her gun as Mulder shoved his way into the room, shouted, “Stop! Step away from the bed with your hands in the air!”

The woman turned on them, and Scully recognized her as Virginia Barclay in the split second before the gun fired, hitting the wall inches away from Mulder's head. She yelped involuntarily, forgot what she was doing for a wild moment and let the nose of the gun tip towards the floor. Mulder jolted, his eyes wide and terrified like a cornered animal.

“Drop your weapon,” Virginia Barclay said evenly, stepping closer to them with her gun aimed. “Do it now, or I'll put a bullet through his skull.”

Scully's eyes darted frantically over to Mulder and saw that he was fine, trembling next to her in the same instinctive fear that had come over her when the bullet fired that close. He didn't have his gun drawn. With Ritter as a hostage and Mulder in the line of fire, there was no hope of overpowering her at the moment. Reluctantly, she let her gun tumble to the floor.

Satisfied, Virginia kicked it away and motioned them further into the room with a wave of the gun. They moved together into a corner, hands in the air. Virginia stepped closer to Mulder, reaching down at his waist and pulling the gun out of his holster. She tossed it off to the side.

Scully saw Ritter on the bed, sitting up, looking pale and terrified. “Dana?” he rasped in surprise.

Virginia moved to the door, keeping the gun on them. “Your affection for each other is still so endearing,” she said, kicking the door closed and and locking it. She was looking at Mulder and Scully. “Absolutely adorable. A bit unfortunate, though, that it brought you here with Dana, Mr. Mulder. I was really hoping to talk to her and Peyton alone.”

“Agent Ritter, is this the woman who attacked you?” Scully asked, and Ritter nodded nervously.

“I saw it as fair,” Virginia said, turning to face them. “Seeing as how you killed Louis, Peyton, and the two of you were there when he died.”

Ritter's forehead furrowed with confusion. “Who?”

“She means Alfred Fellig,” Scully said tensely, her eyes on the other woman. She'd seen the photos from when Virginia was found in the park, eyes closed and gaping wound across her throat, blood speckled on her face and dried on her clothes. She didn't know how to fake that without having actually done it to herself. This woman looked perfectly fine, perfectly alive. “She knew him as Louis Brady.”

Ritter darted between Virginia and Scully nervously, finally trying, “Look, lady, I never meant…” He swallowed nervously, Adam’s apple bobbing. “It was an accident. Dana got hurt, too. I didn't mean to kill him. I swear.”

“Oh, I'm not upset about that,” Virginia said cheerfully. She had the same strange charisma as the other Barclays, and Scully found it incredibly eerie. She could feel Mulder tense beside her; she prayed he was coming up with a plan.

“I know that was what Louis wanted, to die,” said Virginia. “I understand. I just want to know how you did it.”

“How I… what?” Ritter asked, desperately confused.

“How you killed Louis."

Ritter's eyes darted around the room again. "You're kidding, right?" he said, laughing nervously. "I shot him. I just shot him. It was an accident…”

Virginia’s brow furrowed, and she surveyed the other three people. "You just... shot him," she repeated blankly. "Nothing else? Nothing... unusual, no weird little rituals?"

Scully was practically holding her breath. She could tell Virginia about what had happened, what Fellig had told her to do, but she was afraid of what would happen if she did. That Virginia would mortally wound one of them in an attempt to look Death in the face, and she couldn't let that happen to Ritter. Or Mulder, in case he was wrong about the tree and its leaves. She didn't say anything.

"I really don't know what the hell you're talking about," Ritter said, his eyes moving to the gun in Virginia’s hand. "I didn't know what you wanted from me when you abducted me, and I don't really know now. But if you just tell me, I'll do whatever you want."

Virginia gave Ritter an irritable look, turned her attention towards Scully. Scully felt Mulder's hand at her back, brushing over it, coming down to press flat against the small of it. She gulped. She hoped that they hadn't made a mistake in coming.

"You and Peyton, Dana," Virginia said. "You two are the only ones who survived. I don't know which one was an accident and which one was the genuine thing, but I have to narrow it down somehow."

She reached out and grabbed Scully by the arm, yanking her towards the bed and pressing the gun into her side. "What are you doing?" Mulder said frantically. "What the hell are you doing?"

"Move and I'll shoot her right now," Virginia snapped. She shoved Scully forwards until her hip hit the mattress. Ritter was staring at the both of them with frightened eyes.

"Hold still," Virginia told Scully, pushing the gun hard into her side briefly. She lifted the hand with the gun and moved it lightning-fast: yanking the pillow out from under Ritter's head and pressing it down over his face, using the weight of the gun to hold it down.

Ritter made a muffled sound of protest, and began thrashing under the pillow, flailing with his arms to find Virginia and shove her away. Virginia used her free arm to pin Ritter to the bed and pressed the pillow down harder. Without the gun at her side, Scully lunged forward to try and pull her away, but Virginia was much stronger. As Scully pulled on her arms, she stiffened in place; as Scully dug her fingernails into Virginia’s skin with one hand and reached for her eye with another, Virginia kicked backwards, hitting her directly in the knee. Scully crumpled with a brief yowl of pain. Under the pillow, Ritter's struggles were slowing.

Scully looked behind her and found Mulder creeping across the floor to where Virginia had kicked the guns—slowly, so she wouldn't catch him. He met her eyes nervously. Scully nodded meaningfully. The only way to stop Virginia seemed to be shooting her.

She had to get Virginia off of Ritter before she suffocated him, and she had to keep her from seeing Mulder. She tried to get to her feet, to grab Virginia by the shoulders and pull her away, but her legs wobbled with the pain in her kneecap, and when Virginia shook her off violently, that was all it took to knock her to the ground. Scully swallowed back nausea, sneaking a look at Mulder. He was almost to the gun. She looked at Ritter, who was nearly motionless under the pillow, his hands scratching weakly against the mattress.

It took three minutes to suffocate someone. How much time had passed?

Scully saw a pen on the ground, and she grabbed for it almost without thinking. Uncapping it, she jabbed Virginia in the ankle, hard enough to draw blood. Virginia kicked out again, hitting Scully right in the ribs and knocking her away. Scully cried out briefly and sharply, hand to her side. She saw Mulder look at her, so close to the gun, and she shook her head; Ritter needed help now. His hands were still on the mattress.

Scully clenched her jaw with determination. While Mulder began to move towards the gun again, she reached out and grabbed Virginia by the ankle, yanked hard before she could react. The pain rocketed through her side with the sharpness of the motion, but it was worth it; the other woman fell backwards, hitting the floor next to Scully with a smack. Though her knees and ribs were still aching, Scully managed to stumble to her feet and reach for the pillow over Ritter's face. Virginia plowed into her from the side again, suddenly, and went to press down the pillow again. But a gunshot echoed through the room before she could, and Virginia crumpled, red blossoming on her side.

Mulder held the gun across the room. "She'll heal," he said grimly, but the terror was still there, layered underneath it in his voice. The entire interaction had clearly shaken him. Shaken them both.

Scully breathed a sigh of relief, turned to Ritter's bedside and yanked the pillow off of his face. He wasn't breathing.

Panic shot coldly through Scully. "He's not breathing," she said to Mulder, beginning the chest compressions.

"I'll go find somebody," Mulder said. He went running out of the room, his feet echoing on the tiles as they thudded down the hall.

As Scully began to perform CPR on Ritter, her eyes snuck to Virginia, bleeding on the ground. She was looking at Scully with amusement in her glazed-over eyes. "He didn't survive this attempt," she said, hand pressed over the wound in her side. "I guess you must be the one."

Scully was filled with disgust as she watched the other woman, her hands working at Ritter's still chest. And then she had an insane idea as she leaned down to breathe into Ritter's mouth, pinching his nose closed. She breathed into his mouth, and he still was not breathing on his own.

It was insane, but she had to try it. She had to. Virginia wouldn't stop unless she tried. And if it worked, if this ridiculous idea worked... it might help Ritter more than she alone could.

As she went for chest compressions again, she said, "Virginia, do you know how Alfred Fellig died?" Virginia’s eyes swiveled towards her with interest. "He told me to close my eyes, after we'd been shot," said Scully. "He told me to close my eyes, and he looked at Death, and he died."

Inspiration seemed to strike Virginia, and she looked from Scully to the space over Ritter's head. Ritter's eyes were already shut; Scully shut her own, hands ceasing their motion on Ritter's chest. God, it was insane, but they could use a defibrillator when they got here, and she halfway wanted to convince Virginia that there was no way she could die. So that that she would stop pursuing them. But she didn't really believe it would work, not really, not...

And then Scully felt a cold feeling. A feeling she had only felt once in her life: on the floor of Fellig’s apartment. Like an icy specter or something was breathing down her neck. She held her breath and kept her eyes shut.

The feeling was suddenly gone, and Ritter was gasping to life under her hands. Scully opened her eyes and saw him, breathing shallowly on the bed. And then the nurses were coming in, charging the bedside, and Scully was stumbling back to let them care for their patient, and Mulder was appearing at her side, and he was wrapping his arms around her. "Scully?" he asked, squeezing gently so as not to irritate her bruises. "What happened? How did she die?"

Scully looked at where Virginia Barclay was lying on the floor. She was dead, her eyes glazed over, what looked like a small smile on her face. She hadn't even bled that much.

"She looked at Death, Mulder," she said. She leaned her head against his chest, overwhelmed. His heart thudded in her ears. Virginia’s blank eyes stared at her; she closed hers. "She looked at Death," she whispered. "And Ritter and I didn't."

\---

**_january, 1999_ **

_Fellig tells her to close her eyes—in an almost comforting way, like he hasn't been waiting for her to die—and she obeys because she doesn't want to die. She doesn't want to die, she doesn't, and there are faces in her head, tethering her to Earth: her mother, her brother. Mulder. There are still things she wants to do: be a mother, get a promotion, get vengeance for herself and Mulder and her sister and her daughter. She closes her eyes and doesn't die, but Fellig does. She doesn't know what she believes about this. When they load her onto the stretcher and load him in a body bag, she feels no regret. She wanted to live._

_Ritter holds both her hands,  smearing her blood everywhere, and she feels vengeful for it._  You shouldn't be doing this,  _she thinks._  You shot me. You don't get to hold my hands.  _She wishes briefly that Mulder is with her before it all goes black._

_When she wakes up, he is. He's leaning over her hospital bed with his hands in his head. He looks tired, haggard, as if he's been there for days. Scully has a groggy, overwhelming affection for him, and though she cannot speak, she reaches for him. He looks up, sees her hand moving, and his entire face lights up. "Scully," he says, engulfing her hand in both of his. "You're awake."_

_She looks up at him, tiredly tries to tell him everything that she is thinking with only her eyes._

_Mulder laughs a little, squeezing her fingers. He is practically grinning with relief. "I-I'll go get your doctor," he says, standing from his spot next to the bed. Before he puts her hand down, he leans over and kisses her knuckles, and she feels it from head to toe. "You're gonna be okay," he says before he leaves._

_Mulder is there and Mulder continues to be there, through every awkward moment with her mother and brother (both of whom Scully is incredibly relieved to see), through every talk with the doctor, through nearly every conscious moment Scully is conscious for the next two days. She is immensely grateful. She'd missed him. She loves him, she thinks rebelliously to herself one day. She loves him and is so incredibly happy to still be here to tell him so._

_And then, in one hazy moment where she is half-asleep and Mulder is fully asleep beside her bed, she remembers what Fellig said._ Love lasts 75 years, if you're lucky,  _he'd said._  You don't want to be around when it's gone.

_She tries to ignore the flicker of thought, tries to focus on the rational facts in front of her. She is fine. She is not immortal. People don't live forever. But once the idea takes place, it won't let go. She asks Mulder to check up on Fellig’s autopsy report, asks Ritter if he saw anything unusual when he comes to apologize, all just to convince herself that she is insane. It isn't working. Mulder describes the autopsy report as nondescript, tells her that her doctor says she is making the fastest recovery he's ever seen._

I am not immortal,  _Scully tells herself firmly._  I am not.  _Out loud, she tries, "Yeah, Mulder, I don't even know how I entertained the thought. People don't live forever." She is not immortal._

_Mulder can't know what she's thinking, but he clearly does not agree with her on Fellig. He doesn't know what he's doing, but her blood runs cold when he says, "No, no, I-I... I think he would have. I-I just think that... that death only looks for you once you seek its opposite."_

_She looks at him for a long moment, unsure of what to say. He watches her, nudges her thumb with his. She finally clears her throat, breaks the silence. "Mulder, do you think that I'm immortal?" she asks._

_He looks taken aback at her words, but not particularly surprised. She senses that he has been mulling it over these past few days. "I-I... I don't know, Scully," he says tentatively. He strokes her fingers with his thumb. "What do you think?"_

_She doesn't know what she thinks. She swallows, gives a simple, "People don't live forever," again. Mulder changes the subject._

_She hopes that she is not immortal. She hopes. Seventy-five years is nothing compared to eternity, and she doesn't want to forget the ones she loves. She doesn't want to be alone._

\---

**_december, 1999_ **

In the months since he had come back to life, Mulder found that said life was still desperately abnormal. He wondered, at times, if things would ever be normal again. He wondered, at times, if he wanted them to be.

He and Scully had flown up to see his mother straight out of Florida. His mother had hugged him on the porch, crying into his chest, and he'd been overwhelmed with guilt for making her go through this. His mother had believed he was dead at least twice before, if only for a few days, and spent half of her life without her daughter. He shouldn't have made her believe that he was dead for six months. ("It wasn't your fault," Scully would tell him later in an almost scolding tone, like the idea offended her, but it was, in a way. If he wasn't so reckless. If he'd tried to escape sooner.) His mother didn't deserve this and he apologized again and again. This time, she seemed to just be relieved that he was alive.

She had thanked Scully again again and again for refusing to let her have a funeral, and Mulder's chest had swelled with unquestionable affection for his partner. He'd gone to bat with Scully's mother over not having a funeral for her, and now she had gone to bat with his. Full fucking circle in the worst way possible. More and more since his resurrection of sorts, he'd been told about Scully's efforts during the last six months—the way she'd stubbornly held onto the X-Files, even after being repeatedly told what career destroyers they were, her repeated visits to the Gunmen's to look for him, her ultimate refusal to believe he was dead despite all the evidence—and it all just made him ashamed he'd ever doubted her. His partner. He couldn't apologize enough.

Since his return, he'd been living in Scully's apartment. He'd come home to find his apartment sold, and Scully had taken both his fish and the blanket from his couch, so it had made the most sense at the time. (He'd joked.) It was intended to be temporary while he looked for a new place, but the real estate magazine had lain dormant on the table ever since his first weekend at her house. He'd tried to sleep on the couch the first night, but it hadn't worked. After months of sleeping on a bed, he found Scully's couch unusual and uncomfortable, and after months away from her… He'd ended up in her bed by the middle of the night, and she'd rolled over in her sleep until her head was nestled against her shoulder, her arms flung over his ribcage. And since then, he'd just slept in her room with her. He had a side of the bed and a new toothbrush in her bathroom and a series of Ramen Noodle cups in her pantry for the nights Scully had to work late. (He wasn't reinstated yet, he had to go through a psych eval, among other things, but Skinner indicated that he'd have a job again by the new year.)

Scully had missing months of her life like he now did. The difference was that hers was less time and she couldn't remember any of it, whereas Mulder's was twice as long and he could remember every bit of it. They'd talked about it before, Scully telling him how hard it had been to get back to her normal life. She was still having a hard time adjusting to this ordeal herself, he could tell. She had regular appointments with Karen Kosseff, and though she was still going to work daily, he suspected she was avoiding the field for reasons beside not wanting to leave him alone. They both had horrible nightmares, occasionally on the same night, waking up in tears or clutching at each other in a panic. Mulder was still spooked from his captivity; he hated being cooped up at home, alone, after months of being stuck in only a few rooms constantly, and so he'd consistently leave in the middle of the day. Which only served to panic Scully the first few times it happened. After several arguments about it, he eventually just started calling her before he left. Occasionally, she would bring work home for the day—Skinner, understanding the situation better than most, was willing to let it slide—and they'd look at cases on the couch or the kitchen table together. Scully never took cases out of town. They had a routine, and it wasn't a bad one, but Mulder couldn't wait to get back to work. He missed working with her.

They didn't talk about it for weeks, the entire ordeal. Mulder's abduction and six month absence, that night out in the woods, the question of their immortality. Mulder judged that by the way that Scully avoided the subject that she was having trouble confronting it. He didn't blame her—to be someone as religiously skeptical as Scully, the past few months must've been head-spinning. He didn't push her; he just held her through her nightmares and she held him through his. And neither of them pushed each other too far. It was the unspoken rule.

(Another thing they didn't talk about: that night in the hotel room, how far they'd gone. It hadn't happened since, and neither of them brought it up. There was still some leftover tension from before the whole ordeal, and Diana Fowley showing up at Scully's apartment wracked with relief hadn't helped matters. But they were getting there, Mulder liked to think. They were getting there.)

The whole thing finally came up in an unexpected way. It was Christmas Eve, of all nights, and they were watching  _A Christmas Carol_  on Scully's couch. She was leaning into him and pretending she wasn't, and he was in turn pretending he didn't have his arm around her. And all of a sudden, when the scene with Marley's ghost came on, Scully made a small sound and let her cheek fall against his chest. "You want to know something utterly ridiculous?" she asked.

"Did this scene give you nightmares when you were a kid?" Mulder teased, poking her in the side.

She didn't laugh or swat him, which was how he realized she was serious and sobered immediately. "There were a lot of reasons to believe that you were alive, but they all seemed so futile, so I kept coming up with new ones. And one of them..." She sighed, sitting up and shaking her head. "Forget about it. It's silly."

"No, it's not," Mulder said, keeping his arm around her. "Tell me."

She sighed again, looking at the TV. "I told myself that if you were really dead… and if you were somehow right about... people lingering after their deaths… that you'd find a way to let me know." She ducked her head, her hair hiding her face. "It's silly, really," she mumbled.

"No, it's not," Mulder said softly. "It's the kinds of things I told myself when you were gone."

Scully looked up at him then, and her eyes were shining like she was going to cry. "We haven't really talked about it, have we?"

"No, we haven't," he said.

"I think we should," she said. And so they did.

They talked about the Barclays, who were apparently wreaking havoc in prison, about the victims and the pointlessness of their deaths, about Virginia Barclay and how she'd found exactly what she was looking for. "That's what I feel the worst about," Scully said at one point. "That all those people died, and Virginia didn't get any punishment. She got exactly what she wanted."

Mulder rubbed her knee with his thumb absently, said, "Well, I lived with the woman for several months, Scully, as well as her family, and I don't know a lot about them, but I know this: none of them would've given up until they'd gotten what they wanted. Even if we'd arrested her—which would have been hard, considering she didn't have anything to lose—she would have kept looking for a way to die." Scully tipped her head against his shoulder, forehead furrowed in thought, and he kissed her temple. "And remember that we brought the other Barclays to justice," he added. "What they did to us, and the other people they killed in the name of that tree... they're going to pay for that."

Scully nodded absently, her head against his shoulder. "Mulder, do you really think you're going to live forever?" she asked softly.

His arm tightened around her instinctively, and Scully leaned into him further, her arm snaking around his back. "What do you think?" he asked, because he didn't know what else to say.

"Don't ask me that, Mulder," she said firmly, gripping a handful of his t-shirt. "I don't know. I don't... there's no scar."

The skin of his throat suddenly seemed strangely obvious, almost burning. "What does that mean?" he asked, a little sharply. He'd felt the pain of his throat knitting itself back together; he didn't know if he could take Scully telling him it hadn't really happened.

"I... nothing, Mulder. I'm sorry." Her grip on his t-shirt loosened as she pulled back to look at him. "I won't pretend to know what you've gone through," she said sincerely. "I won't. It's just... very hard to wrap my head around. I've survived two near-fatal wounds, as well as whatever the hell that encounter with Padgett was... and I've just told myself it was a fluke all this time, miraculous recoveries, I hallucinated the loss of my heart, I can't possibly be immortal... but I can't tell myself that now. Not after you..." She stopped mid-sentence, swallowed.

Mulder loosened his arm around her and reached down to take her hand. "Back in May... you told me you didn't want to live forever," he said. "At my apartment, the night after your mother's accident."

Scully nodded, an unreadable look on her face. "I didn't," she said, squeezing his hand. "I still don't, not really. Do you?" Mulder said nothing, unsure of how to answer. Scully looked down at where their hands were joined in her lap, muttered, "I mean, you seeked out the Fountain, chewed the leaves and..."

"It was largely an impulse move," he said, and she looked up at him in surprise. He swallowed nervously, but did not break eye contact. "You asked me to promise not to leave you, when you were drunk, and I-I didn't want to break that promise. And I guess in that moment I acted on pure instinct."

"Which was to seek out the Fountain of Youth," said Scully.

Mulder nodded. "I told myself," he said, "that I was doing it so that you could have the option of immortality for someone. Anyone, not specifically me. But in truth... I think I really did want to spend eternity with you." Scully's eyes shone as she looked at him; he got the sense that she was touched. He squeezed her fingers. "And even with everything that's happened since May... that hasn't changed."

Scully looked away, smiling a little. "Forever is a very long time," she murmured.

"Are you quoting J.M. Barrie?" he asked, almost in amusement.

She laughed. "No," she said. "I suppose I'm just worried that you'll change your mind. If it's real and we really are..."

"You could change yours," he pointed out.

Scully looked him in the eye again, and her face was smooth and serious. "Mulder, I don't know if I'm immortal," she said. "But if I am... if I have to live forever... then no, I don't want to do it alone. And I think I signed up to stay with you forever the day I was assigned to the X-Files."

He smiled, gathering her up in his arms. "It's all part of the job description," he said into her hair. "Didn't they tell you that?"

"No," she whispered, hugging him back tightly. "I wasn't prepared at all."

He smiled against the top of her head. She brushed her fingers over his jaw before leaning back. "There's just so many possibilities, Mulder, and it scares me. What if one of us isn't immortal? What if we misjudged what has happened to me, and I die and leave you alone? And everything you've done for immortality has been for nothing?"

"The Barclays took the leaves regularly to stay alive," said Mulder. "Remember? If I change my mind, I can just..."

"But then Virginia Barclay didn't die when she stopped taking the leaves," Scully argued. "We don't know how it works. It might only require one dosage to work forever."

Mulder pursed his lips, wrapped his arms around her again. "With all due respect, I think that these are things we worry about later, Scully. Right now, we have a life, and despite everything preceding these past two months, it actually hasn't been that bad lately." He smiled, nose against her cheek. "I think that... forever can wait a while. We just need to worry about tomorrow right now."

"Oh, yes, tomorrow," Scully said with a bit of a smirk on her face. "All day with my family. Can you handle it?"

"I think now I can handle anything," said Mulder, and he was kidding, but he also meant it. He really, really meant it.

Scully smiled, leaning further into him. Their mouths bumped together before either of them could pull away; they kissed each other like they were drowning.

The clock flipped over to midnight, like an ultimatum. They didn't see it.

Mulder had been thinking, earlier, about Christmas a year ago with Maurice and Lyda. He'd taken them there in an attempt to spend Christmas with Scully, but as the night had gone on, he'd really thought that they were going to die together. And it had happened again and again over the next year, like that night had been a premonition for the rest of the year. But this seemed just as fitting, this new Christmas where they were making an entirely different vow. One year ago, they'd vowed to die together, and they had done that again and again. They were vowing, now, to live together, maybe even forever. A life pact. Maybe the ghosts would find it ironic.

The years stretched on ahead, a potential endless litany, but at the moment, the culmination, none of it seemed like enough. Like forever wasn't long enough for them.

In that moment, time stood still.  
\---

The clock ticked. Time moved forward, endlessly churning.


End file.
